Film Review: ‘The Call of the Wild’ Offers Only Tame Adventure

CHICAGO – “The Call Of The Wild” is an old fashioned story with some expensive and unnecessary technological upgrades. Foregoing man’s best friend in reality, the film replaces the featured dog with an entirely digital creation … which I can’t say was an improvement.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

But the important thing to know going into the film is that Harrison Ford isn’t the star, a computer-generated (CGI) canine named Buck is … so there’s no ignoring the faults of this digital dog who looks like an ungainly hybrid of a St. Bernard and a Collie. And despite its $135 million dollar budget and CGI canine, it’s a slow moving throwback to the kind of films children of the 1980s may have stumbled upon on the old TV series “The Wonderful World Of Disney.”

The film follows the basic storyline of Jack London’s classic 1903 source novel, with some of its rougher edges sanded off. Buck is a pampered city dog in the late 1800s when he’s dognapped and shipped to the Yukon gold rush to work on a sled team. He learns the law of “club and fang” as he is tormented by captors, until he is taken in by a kindly Royal Canadian mailman (Omar Sy) and learns to become part of a pack – and its eventual leader – by delivering packages and letters throughout the territory.

“The Call of the Wild” opened everywhere on February 21st. Featuring Harrison Ford, Omar Sy, Cara Gee, Dan Stevens and Bradley Whitford. Screenplay adapted by Michael Green, from the novel by Jack London. Directed by Chris Sander. Rated “PG”