Eleven Academy Award nominations? Best Picture? Best Director? David Demby’s best film from 2011? Are you kidding me?! This is the film that all our friends said was so great? All I can say is my wife and I had a very different reaction to this film. We talked for days about how truly awful it was in every way, and marveled, frankly, that anyone could feel differently.

I blame Jude Law for my even having watched this wretched film. After the most unpromising opening 15 minutes of any film I can remember (When in Rome was more promising,) my wife and I were both ready to turn it off and go to Plan B: re-watch The Trip.  Then presto: Jude Law suddenly appears, and he is such a fabulous and compelling actor, so warm and charismatic and engaging, that we suddenly got interested merely by the force of his screen presence. Hell, he even made that terrible, charmless actor playing Hugo almost likable: such is the awesome power of Jude Law. But his moment only lasts a few minutes before he is struck dead by what used to be derisively called a dues ex machina. We subsequently stuck with the film in part figuring that Jude Law might return in flashbacks, but alas, so such luck. His fleeting role in the movie is to trick you into thinking the rest of the film might be as good as he is! It’s so cruel.

It takes Hugo 30 minutes to engage any kind of even semi-coherent plot (I timed it, in agony.) That’s a full quarter of the movie, in case you’re wondering. This time is supposed to be devoted to painting a picture of Hugo’s life in the walls of the station, but they somehow manage to make this a colossal bore. Partly this derives from how irritatingly fake it all looks, but the sequences are also badly conceived and written. Consider how poorly Hugo compares to The Secret World of Arrietty, to give one recent example, as a portrait of life in a strange, disorientating world. Not only is Arrietty visually superior, but its narrative is richer – they take the time and make the effort to show life in this world in an interesting and memorable way. In Hugo, all we see is Hugo walking around, winding clocks in a sort-of half-assed way, and occasionally stealing a croissant – that’s not good enough!

As for the overall story, it did nothing for me. I found the children’s friendship to be lifeless and completely unmoving. The child actors themselves are flat-out BAD. Their performances are almost uniformly uncompelling, they have no screen presence, and they have zero chemistry together, so how can they possibly command emotional involvement from the audience? Compare these kids to the incredible child actors and performances in The Secret Garden, for example, and you will begin to see how poorly the leads of Hugo actually discharged their duty. This is a little unfair, of course, because unlike Hugo, The Secret Garden is based on a marvelous story, had a first-rate script, and was directed with tremendous skill and sensitivity, but nevertheless I think the comparison is instructive.

I appreciate the homage this film pays to the quirky but highly primitive films of Georges Méliès, but these films are just not my cup of tea; to me they are like comparing pre-historic cave paintings to Michelangelo, and if this reveals me to be an uncultivated clod, so be it. And as for Méliès himself, Ben Kingsly’s performance is so stale, lifeless and painful to watch, almost like someone blackmailed him into participating, that I found it impossible to develop any kind of emotional bond with him. Even at the end, I could care less about him, indeed, I sort of disliked him.

There there are the characters in the station. That police officer almost drove me into a homicidal rage! There are very few things I despise more in movies than the sub-hackneyed comic device where some clownish boob is always chasing around the hero or heroine. Come to think of it, there is nothing I despise more, even if the device is carried out tolerably well – in Hugo, its execution is the height of incompetence, with a performance from Sacha Baron Cohen that is so embarrassingly unappealing and unfunny that your stomach turns over every time he comes on screen.

Poor Emily Mortimer has the unfortunate honor of playing the woman that is in love with the absurd boob that does nothing but ineptly chase little kids around the station. She deserves better than this, let me leave it at that.

All this begs the question: why is Hugo so critically acclaimed? Put simply: for the same reason all these other horrible movies are critically acclaimed – War Horse, The Artist, The Social Network, The Reader, and on and on and on. Critics want to look smart, and are so influenced by this desire that they can’t see the most obvious things. Fact is, even a humble little film such as Ratatouille positively destroys Hugo as a modern fairy tale set in Paris in which a youth struggles to find his true place in the world. Once you factor out the snob appeal of Hugo’s historical inspiration, there really is nothing there.