100 min | PG | February 21, 2020 | 20th Century Studios
Harrison Ford goes north to the Yukon and finds a dog. The dog is a computer. The wilderness is a hard drive.
Buck is a stolen domestic dog who gets shipped to the Klondike during the gold rush. He pulls a mail sled. He answers to a grieving prospector named John Thornton. He hears something older calling him into the wild. Chris Sanders adapts Jack London’s brutal survival novel into a family adventure, and the adaptation sands every sharp edge off the source. London wrote about violence, hunger, and the thin membrane between civilization and savagery. This film wants none of that, so it builds a gentle redemption story for a man and his digital dog.
Harrison Ford plays John Thornton with the weathered decency that anchors the whole film. He gives Buck a real scene partner, even when the scene partner does not exist on set. Ford makes the loss underneath Thornton legible without ever explaining it. Dan Stevens plays Hal as a mustache-twirling villain in a fur coat, and the performance has no shading at all. Omar Sy brings warmth to Perrault, the mail driver who first puts Buck in a harness. Karen Gillan and Colin Woodell barely register as Mercedes and Charles because the script gives them nothing to do.
Sanders comes from animation, and Michael Green’s screenplay keeps Buck at the center of every frame. That choice exposes the film’s central problem. Buck is entirely computer-generated, and the rendering lands in the uncanny valley. The animators give him human eyebrows and human reactions, so he performs emotions a dog cannot perform, and the artifice breaks the reality of every scene he shares with a live actor. John Powell’s score works overtime to supply the feeling the visuals cannot, swelling under sled runs and snowbound nights to insist on an emotion the images never earn.
The film is competent and earnest and weightless. It takes a story about the wild reclaiming a tamed animal and turns it into a story about a nice dog helping a sad man. The fakeness of Buck poisons the central relationship the film needs you to believe. Ford does everything right and the technology undercuts him at every turn. London wrote about the call of the wild. This version barely whispers.