Blend Basil Rathbone's upper-crust Sherlock Holmes and Harrison Ford's rascally Indiana Jones, and you'll get something like Hugh Jackman's Sir Lionel Frost in the stop-motion film "Missing Link." Sir Lionel is a scientist, explorer, monster seeker and, above all, a Brit. He always keeps calm and carries on, even when his assistant is eaten alive by the Loch Ness Monster.
"Ah," says a surprised Sir Lionel. "Carnivore."
The assistant is rescued in daring fashion by Sir Lionel, which is why we forgive this arrogant, arrow-nosed aristocrat his faults. Indeed, our hearts go out to him when The Optimates Club of London _ the kind of organization a Livingstone or an Amundsen would belong to _ kicks him out for his kooky talk of Bigfoots and Sasquatches. If only the missing link of the film's title, who appears in the forests of Washington state and becomes a major character, were nearly as appealing a character.
