The Call of the Wild — An Unnecessary [Re]adaptation Filled with Bad CGI
I was actually genuinely looking forward to Chris Sanders’ The Call of the Wild. From the trailers, it looked like a modern and fresh re-telling of Jack London’s novel that has been adapted 5 times into film. Alas, I was wrong. The film is a vapid, soulless and boring re-telling of a timeless story filled with a horribly unconvincing fix on Bad CGI instead of us genuinely caring for real-life animals. The film tells the story of how Jack Thornton (Harrison Ford) met a dog named Buck — whom he will share a life-altering experience with as they explore the Alaskan wilderness while Buck finds his calling.
I’ll just start with something that annoys me in almost every film that does this — but, first, a spoiler alert. If you haven’t read or seen The Call of the Wild (and want to see it), I strongly suggest you stop reading now and move on to something else. I’m going to reveal a major plot point of the movie that I can’t gloat over. Once again, SPOILER ALERT! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Throughout the entirety of the film, Harrison Ford narrates in a first-person point of view the story of how he met Buck and his own personal demons his character fights. It’s all good — until the character gets shot and dies during the climax by Dan Stevens’ character. After he dies, he continues to narrate to close-up the film. Just like in Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List where Morgan Freeman’s character would narrate the movie even after he died, this trope is absolutely stupid and needs to stop. The character’s dead. There’s no need for him to NARRATE after he’s dead — it breaks the diegesis of the film and the continuity you YOURSELF were trying to establish during the entirety of the story. OH WELL, I guess. Speaking of Ford, while every critic believes he gives a genuinely good performance, I thought, for the most part, that he phoned it in so poorly as Thornton that I didn’t once believe an iota of his performance. There’s this one sequence in which we see his 77-year old chest as he swims in a lake and looks for gold — it’s probably the most awkward Ford has ever been in his 70s.
As for the other performances, I did like Omar Sy as Perrault — the Québec mailman who shares a profund affection with Buck before he is sold to Hal (Dan Stevens), probably because he was a Québécois. No, seriously, Sy is the only actor that seems to actually care when he’s on-screen even if the dialogue he’s given is wholly uninspired and tepid. I genuinely loathed Dan Stevens as the main antagonist — who has zero development whatsoever but keeps being angry at everyone for literally sweet fuckall. The funniest thing about his character is that he believes Thornton is looking for Gold — yet doesn’t want to learn the actual truth about his character and only wants to desperately kill him because the dogs he bought left his abusive ass. It’s one of the poorest “desire for revenge” characters out of any film that came out this year (and the last!). Karen Gillan also makes a wild cameo, but she’s barely in it for me to actually talk about her on-screen impact, which is nonexistent.
Every critic has also been needlessly comparing The Call of the Wild to another Disney-dog movie that came out last year, Togo, on Disney+, and they’re absolutely justified to compare this film to Ericson Core’s direct-to-consumer movie about a “master and his dog”. Togo is an infinitely better film due to one sole characteristic — they use real-life dogs. Obviously, in THAT movie, the CGI isn’t as polished as in The Call of the Wild (especially when they cross the lake…it looks as bad as a Sharknado film and I’m not even exagerating), but at least Ericson Core gave us animals that we could genuinely care for, because they were real. It added the layer of authenticity that was desperately needed. In The Call of the Wild, because ALL of the animals are CGI (except for two goats like wtf), the stakes that are being put on the table feel weightless. Many of the film’s big action setpieces are filled to the brim with terribly unconvincing CGI (dare I say, more unconvincing than CATS) that completely takes you out of the movie with a horrible music score from John Powell that complements the non-exictement we’re watching when a CGI dog and a CGI wolf “fight”. I sure wouldn’t mind a switch between a real and a CGI dog for the action setpieces — but was it really necessary to have a fully computer generated mutt for the entirety of the film? No. Ergo, The Call of the Wild is just plain boring.
It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to this movie. While some sequences are entertaining (the avalanche-cave escape was pretty fun), it really isn’t enough for me to recommend The Call of the Wild, even if you’re a sucker for dog films. The better movie in that category is Ericson Core’s Togo which you can stream on Disney+. Instead of giving your money to Disney for a soulless and vapid re-hash of a timeless adventure novel, why not give your money to Disney for a genuinely affectionate film with a great performance from Willem Dafoe and a story handled with maturity and finesse — something deeply lacking in Disney movies this year. The mediocre streak continues.
✯½
