Missing Link review: a Bigfoot animation rich in visuals, but not plot
Dir: Chris Butler. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Zach Galifianakis, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Stephen Fry, David Walliams, Matt Lucas, Emma Thompson, Amrita Acharia. PG cert, 95 min
Missing Link begins on Loch Ness, where Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes finished up. What bigger mystery could there be for a Victorian adventurer-sleuth to solve? This being a family-friendly animation from the Laika production team, who gave us Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, it’s no surprise that a cutely fearsome Nessie appears, right on cue.
During Wilder’s film, a 30-foot model of the monster sank into the loch. Here its stop-motion equivalent goes about its gnashing, writhing business in the safe space of Laika’s Portland studios, and serves up a good deal more unbridled spectacle. The sequence is a treat, with dapper Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) trying to get his camera tripod poised just so, while his valet, a hapless Watson lookalike, flails around on one end of a rope, Nessie’s indignant head noosed in the other.
Previous Laika achievements – Kubo in particular – have traded in wistful, artisanal melancholy. As the opening suggests, this is much more of a romp, skewing younger and breezier, with the presiding hand of Laika’s leading animator, Travis Knight, delegating direction to Chris Butler (ParaNorman).
Frost’s next project is to find the Sasquatch – Bigfoot himself – and prove the stuffed shirts of the explorers’ society all wrong about human evolution. His conjecture sends him off solo to the forested expanses of post-Gold-Rush Oregon, and then to the fabled peaks of Shangri-La, the rumoured dwelling place of this being’s distant relatives.
The whistle-stop format, complete with live progress inked on archaic maps, will soon out Frost as a kind of tweed-suited Indiana Holmes; the ice-bridge climax that awaits is pure Temple of Doom with stalactites. First, though, there’s Mr Link (Zach Galifianakis) to bring into play – a diffident, civilised creature who can speak, much to the hero’s astonishment, and is well-versed in his historic exploits thanks to the malicious reports of the British press.
Frost knows that this furry fellow is his meal ticket, and the film has fun with his excitable coloniser’s mentality – he vaunts himself as a truth-seeker, but his methods are brutish, with personal glory the obvious holy grail. Link, a curly mutant rechristened “Susan” without the film protesting much, is a peace-loving autodidact who could probably stick up for himself a little more. He could do with getting the hang of English idioms, too: his confusion over phrases such as “you have my word” and “you don’t say!” gives Butler’s script its most disarming curlicues.
Delectable familiarity, not edge or novelty, is the name of the game here. Missing Link is Laika’s most Aardman-esque adventure, right down to the goofy, toothy grin that Susan is occasionally caught sporting. At its safest, it can feel like a mixtape of stray motifs from two of Aardman’s recent offerings, The Pirates! and Early Man, landing somewhere around that quality level.
Momentum also takes a dip here and there, while the film rummages about in its bag of characterisations. Zoe Saldana’s enraged adventuress is a feisty cliché, familiar from a dozen Salma Hayek turns. The villains are more enjoyable: Lord Piggot-Dunceby (Stephen Fry) is a mutton-chopped enemy of science, huffy, apoplectic and begging to be cut down to size. Meanwhile, a snaggle-toothed prospector called Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant) does all his dirty work. A late cameo from Emma Thompson as an abominable matriarch is weird but welcome.
Narratively, Laika haven’t pushed the boat out with what amounts to a primate buddy comedy – a lightbulb pops in the screenplay, practically in relief, when one character gawkily declares, “I’ve evolved!” As a par project, though, it shows that this team are in fairly rude health, especially if you’re into scenic distraction. Those towering Oregon firs are a vertical dream out of Caspar David Friedrich, and the glistening ice-scapes of their Shangri-La put every film version of Lost Horizon thus far to shame.
Laika may not be conquering the world with this outing. But if every studio’s three-star films were as bounteous with the eye candy, we’d be in clover.