The Call of the Wild
THE CALL OF THE WILD - 20th Century Fox
Based off Jack London’s novel, The Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck (Terry Notary acting as a stand-in for the CGI dog), a Saint Bernard-Scotch Collie cross, owned by Judge Miller (Bradley Whitford), who is snatched from his California home by dognappers and shipped to the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. Throughout the film Buck falls under the ownership of numerous masters, while he is unable to escape the ancestral pull to the northern wilderness.
The Call of the Wild is meant to be a delightful children’s film, and for parts it succeeds, but other scenes are slow and emotionless. The best part of the film is when Buck is chosen to be a sled dog on a rag-tag team; it consists of various dog breeds, most of which aren’t suited to their task of delivering mail several hundred miles throughout the Yukon, but they’re show character and do their best, especially under the authoritarian rule of a lead sled dog, a mean husky named Spitz. The sled team belongs to Perrault (Omar Sy), a black man from Quebec, and Françoise (Cara Gee), an Inuk woman, who are both working as couriers for Royal Mail Canada. Here, Buck is taught to be a working dog and encounters his first brush with the wilderness. These scenes are highly amusing because of Perrault and Françoise’s relationship. They two play off one another very well, adding much needed humour to the film.
While continuing with the mail service concept would have made The Call of the Wild too similar to other sled dog films like Togo or Snow Dogs, the film takes a downhill tumble when Perrault’s and Françoise’s mail route is terminated in favour of the telegraph system. Buck and the other dogs end up being sold to a couple of rude rich people, Hal, Charles, and Mercedes, (Dan Stevens, Colin Woodell and Karen Gillan), and become overworked and abused in a distressing series of scenes, before Buck ends up with John Thornton (Harrison Ford). Under Thornton, Buck truly embraces the call of the wild.
Along with playing Buck’s last master, Ford’s character also provides narration for the film’s duration. It is an odd choice considering Harrison Ford is only in slivers of the film until the third act, and his character would have no idea of Buck’s time with Perrault and Françoise or with Hal, Charles, and Mercedes. Despite this, Ford is well-suited to play an old prospector balancing out his gruffness and sarcasm, and makes Thornton’s connection with Buck believable with an air of tender sweetness.
Other strange choices include the titular call of the wild, which appears to Buck as a ghost-like black timber wolf with glowing yellow eyes during times of distress, when needs his wild wolf instincts to kick in. Another scary point is when the sled dog, Spitz, brutally kills an Arctic Hare; the CGI makes the scene hyper realistic and pretty graphic for a children’s movie. The film is much too reliant on the CGI, and every single animal except for two goats are computer generated. At certain points this is fine, but there are other points where the CGI just feels off-putting, such as when the dogs are required to show emotions. They sometimes feel a little too human, a complete 180° turn from The Lion King in 2019, whose animals were completely devoid of emotion. In fact, if the viewer is able to accept the CGI the film becomes much more enjoyable.
Overall The Call of the Wild is a decent film, but with its premise, it likely would have been better as an original for a streaming platform, likely Disney Plus, despite Disney’s recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox - today’s 20th Century Studios. The Call of the Wild is the first film to be released under the studio’s new name. Parts of the film are cute and parts of it drag, but overall it is a decent venture for kids who probably won’t delve into the specifics of the CGI.
THE CALL OF THE WILD is released February 19th 2020