The Call of the Wild

Buck is lovable forever. If you think he’s perfection on four legs, he is. If you think he’s the most human dog since Lassie, Benji and Rin Tin Tin, he isn’t. Because Buck, you see, is computer-generated. Never mind. I guarantee you will love him anyway.

I’m not sure who a faithful adaptation of The Call of the Wild would even be for in 2020. Instead, we get a pleasant movie about Harrison Ford having a nice time, laughing it up with his dog pal – and I really can’t imagine a better way to tell this story than that.

It should please family audiences; it’s a handsomely mounted, stirring adventure. It’s just a little bit declawed.

For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.

Ford gives a grounded, quietly powerful performance as a reclusive, regret-filled, self-pitying old-timer who crawls out of a bottle and finds a renewed sense of purpose when he sees the world through Buck’s eyes. If only those eyes weren’t so distractingly incongruous.

The blessings of technology actually undermine the movie in significant, distracting ways.

Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I think the fake CGI dog stops this film from being good but the music and story is really sweet and fun. Harrison Ford was definitely trying here.

I admit I had assumptions going into this film. I thought it was all about Ford and his dog, but it's all about the dog. Ford's a great part, but it's not like the trailers made it out to be. So, I really hated the first act. The CGI was really rough and it seemed super cheesy and bland. Then, it started to pick up and became a pretty decent movie. It was very cliche and predictable but it was fun enough as the movie moved along. 7/12

The CGI dog did a poor acting. I don't know how it is done, but it was very weird. The dog's behaviour was totally unreal. It is as if a human acted as a dog. Poorly made movie, could not even stand more than 10 minutes of it.

This is a loathsome, pandering, mess of a movie. The CGI is too slick by half, and the anthropomorphization of the animals would have Disney animators rolling their eyes and saying, "Really?!?" Harrison Ford gets a wide degree of latitude from me under most circumstances, but this movie should never have been made. I'm trying to imagine if I would like this movie if I were 8 years old, or had children who were. I can't see it. Ugh. A disappointing waste of 1 hour, 39 minutes (which seemed much longer)