Mio in the Land of Faraway Review

Three countries paid for this Astrid Lindgren adaptation and the seams show in every reel. The Soviet crew supplies the one genuine pleasure, a landscape of bleached rock, black woods and a bridge of morning light that looks lifted from a woodcut, and Christopher Lee gives Sir Kato a stone heart and an iron claw and plays him as something that wants to be killed.

Everything else works against that atmosphere. Nicholas Pickard plays Mio as a boy waiting to be told where to stand, and Christian Bale, already the most alert presence on screen, cannot carry a friendship by himself. The dubbing is the ruin of it. Russian actors mouth one language while flat English line readings sit on top of them, so grief and terror never land on the beat the faces are playing.

Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus contributed a theme song that arrives like a pop single stapled to a funeral. Worse, the quest is a list rather than a build, one wonder after another with no rising pressure, and the confrontation in Kato's castle is finished before the dread the film spent an hour accumulating can be spent. What survives is weather, not story.