TOM Hanks has hit the buffers. First, the Coen Brothers' remake of The Ladykillers suited neither Hanks and his false teeth, nor the Coens in their switch from arty to artless. Then Steven Spielberg's The Terminal failed to repeat the magic of Hanks's earlier gnomic role, Forrest Gump.

Unlike his box of chocolates, with Tom Hanks you do normally know what you are going to get: a more palatable version of fellow chameleon Robin Williams. However, he is on his first losing streak, and the animated The Polar Express fails to arrest the decline, no matter that he voices not one but five roles (including Santa Claus).

Working with Hanks for a third time after Forrest Gump and Castaway, Robert Zemeckis directs a surrealist Christmas adventure that is more an exhibition than a movie, a showcase for a computer animation technique with the unworldly name of "performance capture technology".

This technique - and be assured this is more interesting than the plot - required the actors to wear special suits, covered in hundreds of sensors, and to perform their scenes without props and sets. Their performances were then transferred to digitally-made film. The result on screen is a form of animation but supposedly with realistic movements and emotions.

In truth, the animation looks glass eyed, too smooth and near comatose, but the real failing here is the thin story.

Chris Van Allsburg's source book is only a 28-page story: not much material for the adventures of a bunch of materialistic, present-hungry American kids who climb aboard conductor Hanks's mystery train to the Santa of the earth.

As ever with animation, the human movement and eye detail is the most difficult to achieve, and so adults and children alike are strangely scary, even creepy.

Zemeckis takes great pleasure in capturing the journey of a train ticket, the movement of a train, but you cannot force magic, and The Polar Express has the feel of a dead hand gripping it.

Science wins, art and entertainment and Christmas cheer lose out.

See Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas - re-issued on DVD - instead.

Updated: 09:57 Friday, December 10, 2004