Rise of the Guardians Review

Look at the dreamsand. Sandman, the only Guardian who never speaks, throws ribbons of gold across a sleeping city, and the way that light moves is the loveliest thing DreamWorks put on screen in a decade. Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting, and it shows in the North Pole interiors and in the black sand Pitch later pours down the same streets.

Jude Law gives Pitch Black a sly, wounded quality that children's villains rarely get near, and Hugh Jackman's Bunnymund is a bad tempered Australian with boomerangs, a joke that keeps working because the film commits to it completely. The trouble is the machinery built around the images. Jack Frost's arc runs on amnesia, a device that lets the script withhold information for eighty minutes and then hand it over as a memory box, and Chris Pine holds a single register of wounded cool throughout.

The collapse of belief in the third act, where children stop believing and the Guardians weaken, is undone by one boy deciding otherwise, a shortcut that makes the stakes feel administrative. Isla Fisher's Tooth is gorgeous design work in search of a character to attach itself to.