‘Tad the lost explorer & the secret of king Midas’ review: All that glitters…
‘Tad the lost explorer and the secret of king Midas’ has a pretty abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score- twenty nine percent. So, I know it’s going to take some doing if I am to try and convince you to give this 2018 flick a whirl.
But here’s the thing- I am not trying to do that.
All I wanted to say is that the movie doesn’t deserve such poor ratings as what you find in many review sites online. (Rotten Tomatoes’ rating system is not the best in the world to begin with).
But, obviously I have something more to say. Otherwise, this entry wouldn’t go on like this.
If you would like to know more about a pleasingly executed animated movie that only asks for under 90 minutes of your precious time, then, please read on.
‘Tad the lost explorer and the secret of king Midas’ is the sequel to ‘Tad the lost explorer’- a duo of films that revolve around the titular character who is a somewhat goofier(but likeable) alternative to Indiana Jones. Both the films are Spanish productions and both have apparently had a good run in the box office in that country.
I haven’t seen the first flick yet and only happened to stumble upon this one boring afternoon when I was going through Netflix movie lists.
The story is about an evil villain wanting to gain Midas’ power- which aside from helping him turn things to gold would also give him abilities like cracking open the earth with a stomp of his staff(oh, yes).
The villain’s ambition is total global domination; however, Tad- and his girlfriend, Sara- who is a professional archeologist- are not going to allow him that if they could help it.
The film seems confused whether it wants to be a romantic flick or an all-out adventure.
Eventually, it settles on a middle path which doesn’t please fans of either genre(and it doesn’t help create an exciting hybrid either).
But along the way, there are some interesting set pieces executed with a panache which approximates(but never match) that of the best Hollywood products of the same category.
As I said before, Tad is a likeable enough character(He is a construction worker who studies archeology in his downtime-probably to please his girl. How could you not like him?). Supporting him in his adventure is an Inca mummy who is one of the more colorful characters in the film.
Hanging out with them is certainly not the worst thing that you could do as they go about trying to get what Midas had left behind for the later generations.
Only, you wish the filmmakers had dug a little deeper(pun intended) into the Midas mythos and brought out a few more characters from that era to play in the contemporary times in which the film is set. That would surely have added more dimensions and zest to the proceedings.
Whether it was budgetary constraints or something else which prevented them from talking that route, I don’t know.
All I know is that all that glitters is not gold, and there is a whole lot of glitter in this movie.
