Metacritic reviews

The film’s avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism and by its deepening of the man-dog bond that forms the heart of London’s story.

For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.

The result is a bit corny, a bit cheesy and you might feel self-conscious going, “Aww …” at creatures that are not real dogs but laptop fabrications. But it’s a robust and old-fashioned entertainment with some real storytelling bite.

Stands out for its earnest effort to entertain without commenting on itself or the modern world.

The results are visually disorienting, to say the least. Although Notary and the special effects team do as good a job as technology allows, the expressive Buck never quite looks real. And you keep expecting him and the rest of the animals to burst into song.

The 2020 Call of the Wild isn’t all-out atrocity so much as a question mark, a formulaic adventure story spruced up with cutting-edge technology in search of a purpose.

It is neither disaster nor dream, landing firmly somewhere in the disappointing middle.

Slow, emotionless and boasting fairly mediocre production values, this misguided kid movie turns Jack London’s classic tale about the natural world into something barely recognizable as part of that world.

Call Of The Wild isn’t animation, it isn’t live action, it isn’t fish, fowl or dog and somewhere in between it falls off its sled. Mankind can always benefit from some digital enhancement; man’s best friend, not so much.

I found this a perfectly handsome and literarily defensible mounting of a well-known tale that was far and away the most bloodless version of it. Ever.