Peter was a feisty orphan in an institution run by an obese monstrous nun. Peter might as well don a leather trench coat, sunglasses, and practice a martial art or two (sadly he never learns Kung Fu, a decided missed opportunity). After a few hours of waiting and nothing happening, Peter gets sleepy and decides to go to bed.
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Suddenly several boys, including Peter, find themselves swept away in the middle of the night by airborne pirate ships. There he meets the evil and badly dressed Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), who supposedly exterminated the fairy population and now uses the boys as slave labor to mine the youth-regenerating minerals the fairies left behind.
When Blackbeard suspected that Peter may be the young boy foretold to overthrow him from power, he was promptly imprisoned. Far out, man. Children who disobey Blackbeard walk the plank and fall hundreds of feet to their death. They float around the attractive clouds, only to land on the NeverLand.
I do hope for more Peter Pan in the future, but only if the concept used for the film does not rob us of the pure magic that this mischievous lost boy, who first stole our hearts nearly 100 years ago, brought to the screen. The prophecy is about a boy who can fly, a boy known as The Pan.
The plot unfolds with a scene at an orphanage where Peter along with his close friends tries hard to search for his identity as well as goes against the injustice delivered to the children of the orphanage by the lady in-charge.
Even the story of the story of Peter Pan has been made into a film, Finding Neverland, and its conception carries the same grief found on The Affair.
Underneath the video-game inspired pirate battles, multi-colored tree villagers, and cavernous pixie dust mines, Wright says he wanted make a movie that “reconnected and validated the 11-year-old boy in myself”. Just because Blackbeard fulfills the villain role in Pan doesn’t mean he can’t dress to impress and impress he does, thanks to costume designer Jacqueline Durran, here channeling her inner Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker’s Dracula). It’s just too bad Jackman’s take on the iconic pirate is not enough to save the film from being the disaster that it is.
Garrett Hedlund as the boisterous adventurer James Hook, is probably the most confusing character in the ensemble. Hedlund bounces from Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones films to Harrison Ford in Star Wars, and it’s jolting to watch his freaky take on Hook.
American actress Rooney Mara plays Tiger Lily, who typically in the Peter Pan stories is a Native American. Mara’s Tiger Lily doesn’t really do much else except flirt with Hook in a few scenes that don’t connect with the audience and are actually cringe-worthy.
Speaking of which, in “Pan”, Hook becomes a very different fellow, more of an Anakin Skywalker pre-Darth.
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His parents founded a puppet theatre when he was young, and the otherwise gifted director appears to have seen the Pan project as a vehicle to return to the fantasy of his childhood years. The character’s written in a way that makes this version of Peter a quivering, fearful, unimpressive young man who bears nothing at all like Peter’s shadow let alone Peter himself once he gets to Neverland.
