Scott Reviews Peter Ramsey’s Rise of the Guardians [Theatrical Review]

With superhero films being all the rage these last ten years, a small subset of films have taken the task of reconfiguring the standard hero arc for a younger set. Sometimes this results in the best the genre has to offer, as with The Incredibles, while other times you get something like Underdog (oh yeah, that happened). While Rise of the Guardians is not precisely a capes-and-tights outfit, it takes familiar archetypal figures – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and more prominently Jack Frost – and reconfigures them as, essentially, a superhero team. While much of it is a lot of fun, the decision to pin so much of the film on the least dynamic character makes for a unfortunately familiar, and familiarly unfortunate, story.

Let’s start with the good – the core Guardians team, consisting of the first four fantastical figures. All four of them have sharply-defined personalities that both clash and complement the others well, they have a clear sense of purpose, and fantastic capabilities in the action scenes. Alec Baldwin, his voice nearly unrecognizable with some Germanic/Russian mix of an accent as Santa (called North in the film for…I don’t know, copyright purposes?), steals every scene he’s in, and one longs for a protagonist as compelling as he. On the other side of the good/evil divide, Jude Law plays the Boogeyman with all the relish you’d hope for.

But the persistent, and ever-increasing, demand for mainstream cinema is that the most interesting characters must be relegated to the sidelines in favor of bland, disaffected layabouts at the center. This particular film’s center is Jack Frost, who’s bummed because although he has cool supernatural powers, nobody believes in him, and thus when he’s called up to be a Guardian himself (by the silent Man on the Moon, as clear a substitute for God as you’ll ever find), he figures this whole helping-people thing isn’t his bag, so forget that noise. He’s finally convinced to come along when it turns out there’s something in it for him, but he doesn’t even exhibit the kind of selfishness that would make even this a compelling motivation. Voiced by the usually-charismatic Chris Pine, Jack Frost is an empty shell of narcissistic affectations and too-cool-for-this-shit posturing. He’s a real drag.

It’s too bad, because the film along which he’s floating is pretty entertaining stuff, full of mystical battles and sharp chatter and absolutely gorgeous imagery. Taking a page from Wall-E, the filmmakers (DreamWorks Animation, director Peter Ramsey) hired cinematographer Roger Deakins as a visual consultant, creating the prettiest film the studio’s produced since The Prince of Egypt. The 3D is pretty spectacular, unafraid of launching debris and snow and various mystical effects right at your face. I was sitting fairly close, and I’ll admit, I flinched a few times, and if you think that’s all cheap parlor tricks, more power to you. I find damned effective cinema.

The extent of your own enjoyment will likely hinge on how well you can hang with this whole Jack Frost problem. For me, it pretty much broke the film, but the appeal of the rest is undeniable. I’ll just wait for true heroism to re-emerge in our cinemas.