Grade: C

Verdict: A technical marvel with a machine-made heart

By STEVE MURRAY
Cox News Service

The little girl looks out the train window and sighs, "It's so Christmassy and cozy and beautiful." She's referring to the yuletide storefront display of a passing department store, featuring a windup Santa.

It's a telling indicator of what the makers of "The Polar Express" view as magical: something store-bought, staged, mechanical. The movie seems determined to be an instant Christmas classic, but its idea of seasonal awe comes straight off a factory conveyor belt.

Based on the picture book by Chris Van Allsburg and directed by Robert Zemeckis, the computer-animated film is a technical novelty. It features a process called performance capture, which takes the filmed performance of real actors and translates them into digital characters. It's an advanced version of motion-capture technology. (Think of Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" movies, writ large.) For example, Tom Hanks, one of the movie's executive producers, plays six separate roles, from the young, unnamed Hero Boy to Santa Claus himself.

Unfortunately, all the creative energy on the film seems to have been spent on the digital technology, with the script (by William Broyles Jr.) feeling like an underbaked afterthought.

The tale begins on Christmas Eve, as Hero Boy goes to bed wondering, for the first time, if Santa really exists. Lo, a magical train pulls up outside his house, and he's invited by the stern conductor (Hanks) to climb in and journey to the North Pole to witness Santa's liftoff in his reindeer-drawn sleigh.

Aboard the train, Hero Boy meets a bunch of other kids, including the feisty Hero Girl (Nona M. Gaye), a Lonely Boy (Peter Scolari) and a pesky Know-It-All boy. And it's here that the digital wizardry of the movie shows its seams. These kids look weird, dead-eyed, creepy, as if they're wearing rubber masks. Their movements are also sluggish sometimes, or just plain inhuman. (Realistic running seems to be a particular challenge for the computers.)

Another problem is that they're played by adults, their voices digitally altered. That's fine with the two Hero kids. But Eddie Deezen, age 46, lends his voice to the little annoying boy and delivers a little, annoying performance that clearly sounds like a man trying to play a kid.

The train ride north is a delivery-system of roller coaster-style action scenes as the Express plunges down steep hills, into tunnels and across a frozen lake. Up on the roof, Hero Boy meets a bizarre hobo ghost (Hanks again) who disappears in a blur of snowflakes, waving a disembodied hand. Huh?

Boy also encounters a couple of grotesque train engineers, one fat and bald, one skinny and bearded, both of them more suited to a Halloween movie than a Christmas one. Oh, then there's the army of waiters — mustached clones who somersault through the air and dance with all the digital elegance of an early version of Pong. They're enough to turn sugarplum dreams into a nightmare.

Granted, "Polar Express" has moments of visual dazzle, if not real magic. We follow a train ticket, snagged by the wind, as it flies through the air, gets nabbed by an eagle, and ultimately gets blown back to the train. Once in the North Pole, Hero Boy and Girl explore some of Santa's workshops, including an amusingly retro console of TV screens monitoring all the world's naughty and nice children as they sleep. But for the most part, the Christmas capital is a somber urban place of hard red bricks. It's presided over by a Kriss Kringle (yep, Hanks), who looms out of his palace with the self-regarding pomp of a dictator.

Long in the works, "The Polar Express" is a labor of love from Zemeckis and Hanks, but they've supersized the book's sweet simplicity into a mammoth Hollywood machine that makes a hard sell of Christmas. The movie trumpets the values of belief and imagination, but through the most literal, concrete methods. It all feels prefab, including a score by Alan Silvestri that sounds close to a rip-off of Danny Elfman's music from "Edward Scissorhands."

Unlike last year's "Elf," which created real holiday magic with its generous spirit and Will Ferrell's helium-light performance, "The Polar Express" is like a soap bubble made of lead. Even if it's wrapped in $165 million worth of tinsel (the movie's reported budget), a lump of coal is still a lump of coal.