Fun, fearless travels

You get the feeling that Steve Spielberg had a whole lot of fun making “The Adventures of Tintin.”

The picture permitted him to recapture the spirit of the fastest moving and most purely enjoyable movie of his career: “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Tintin (Jamie Bell), the boy hero of the popular and long-running series of graphic novels by Belgian author Herges (whose real name was Georges Remi), travels to exotic foreign locales and gets into and out of all sorts hair-raising scrapes. He’s fearless. He’s clever. He’s indomitable. He’s Indiana Jones.

Or more precisely, he’s Indy without the fedora but rather with a signature standup cowlick, without the bullwhip but with a doughty little doggie named Snowy.

Spielberg has said he hadn’t heard of Tintin until after he made “Raiders” in the early 1980s and learned that European critics were drawing comparisons between his hero and Herge’s. He recognized the similarities at once, and now in his “Adventures of Tintin,” he’s embraced the connection.

A mystery involving a trio of three-masted ship models containing coded messages sends the lad racing around the world for answers. Gunfights, a plane crash, a sea battle and more gunfights ensue. Although Tintin is chased and shot at, clouted and captured by assorted baddies led by a malign Daniel Craig, Spielberg handles the potentially deadly doings with a whimsical touch. Swimming submerged toward evildoers in a seaplane, all we see of the kid is his super-stiff cowlick slicing through the waves like a shark fin. Clever, that “Jaws” reference, and just the thing to break the tension.

Much of the comic relief comes courtesy of Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis, affecting a Scottish brogue that sounds pilfered from Gerard Butler). Called, with good reason, “a drunkard and a hopeless reprobate” by some, Haddock, with his sozzled blustering – “Blue blistering barnacles!” – and his bungling – “Ooops, sorry about that wrong-way bazooka shot!” – is an effective foil for the more sobersided Tintin.

Spielberg teamed with “Lord of the Rings” creator Peter Jackson to make “Tintin,” and he used the motion-capture technology Jackson perfected in creating Gollum (also played by Serkis) to make an animated 3-D extravaganza that astonishes in its degree of visual detail.

Spielberg isn’t an innovator with this technology the way he was with “Jurassic Park” and its computer-generated dinos, but he uses this style of high-tech animation with the joy of a kid let loose in a candy store. ‘The Adventures of Tintin’

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Cast: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig

Director: Steven Spielberg

Running time: 2:07

Rated: PG; intense action sequences, drinking, smoking