Renaissance

Renaissance is a French animated movie that uses a motion capture 3D film technique resulting in a style not to dissimilar to Sin City. Daniel Craig, Catherine McCormack and Ian Holm have dubbed the audio track for the English language version but unfortunately even with these stars, the movie still sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon like so many dubbed animated movies do. Renaissance is set in Paris in the year 2054, where the city has become an Orwellian type Big Brother. Every movement and conversation is recorded by the government. When a scientist is kidnapped and the disappearance not picked up by the surveillance cameras, manic cop Barthélémy Karas (Craig) is assigned to find the scientist and solve the mystery. Although the animation looks nice, the plot and story is nothing we haven't seen before in other films. The characters were bland and wooden, with dialogue straight out of a kids computer game. All I could hear whilst watching the film was Daniel Craig and not the character he was supposedly playing, an extremely lazy performance from him. It was like you could tell he was reading straight from the script, no life in him at all. The animation style does look nice but I got bored with it after 40 minutes. Without any type of substance, there is not a lot to keep you interested here.

rating: 2

The movie apparently took 7 years to make but in that time they completely forgot about how to craft a story and characters together. Some nice visuals but on the whole not a lot of substance makes this a film to avoid.