Missing Link
⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: PG for action, peril and mild rude humor.
This tale of people, not-so-mythical beasts and world-spanning adventures is ingeniously wrought but only intermittently enthralling. It's a rich-looking blend of stop-motion animation, enhanced with computer-generated effects and 3-D printing techniques. Yet, these all are servicing an emotionally wanting plot, humor that doesn't always land and a too frequent and too dark undercurrent of threatened violence.
Writer/director Chris Butler's first film was 2013's Oscar-nominated "ParaNorman," about a boy who felt like an outcast and saw ghosts. Here he creates two more outcasts — an explorer (voiced by Hugh Jackman) whose views aren't accepted by the adventurers' club he longs to join, and a lonely, last-of-his-breed sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis) who wants to leave the Pacific Northwest and join his cousins in the Himalayas.
Butler's fable, which echoes such stories as "Around the World in 80 Days" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," too often loses its emotional energy, stalling among the intricacies of fight scenes or Himalayan vistas.
Only Galifianakis puts his heart into his performance. Other characters seem to explain the plot rather than live it.
The movie doesn't lay an egg by any means. It is visually stunning, and the humor that does work is effective. Yet, ambitious as it is, the film doesn't sail easily enough between its disparate parts.
Jane Horwitz, Washington Post