For a character who never grows up, Peter Pan tends to appear in movies as a reflection of adult hang-ups. Occasionally, there is a kind of poetry in this, as in the way that Hook used Peter to air out Steven Spielberg’s anxieties over being a big kid forced to grow up as he faces fatherhood. For the most part, however, Peter Pan’s recent depictions exist solely to provide dark updates to J.M. Barrie’s material, mining the character’s eternal youth for name-recognition box office while cynically excoriating it with increasingly “edgy” reimaginings. Pan could stand as the new worst offender in this cycle, an aspirational franchise-starter that decides that the only way to appreciate the story is to trace Peter back to his earliest origins. In the process, it replaces the story’s fundamentally loose focus on adventure with a rigidly ordered narrative that exists solely to set up future installments.
From the outset, the film unfurls as a veritable mountain of exposition, introducing Peter (Levi Miller) as an abandoned child in a WWII-era orphanage. He must contend with the avarice and cruelty of evil nuns before he is abducted by pirates in a flying ship and pressed into service for the maleficent Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). So much data is dumped on the audience’s head in the first 20 minutes that any younger viewer could not help but get lost, and the literal-minded attention to explaining absolutely everything about Neverland is so extreme that even fairy dust becomes Pixum, crystallized magic that can be smoked to regain youth. Effectively, Peter goes from an abused, forsaken boy in an orphanage to an unwitting miner for crystal meth, a piling on of misery so absurd that it loses any sense of actual danger. (That, in fact, is the film’s greatest irony, that it piles on so many nominally adult details but does not contain any of the truly troubling implications embedded within the dual casting of an actor as both the father and Hook in classic stage adaptations.)
Actual exploration of Neverland is reduced to filler scenes designed to provide a little eye candy to win kids back after alienating them with endless explanations. This reverses the point of the actual story by making the whimsy and exploration of Barrie’s text an afterthought, despite the fact that here Peter is experiencing the world’s wonders for the first time. This warped assignment of importance ripples inward from the background to affect nearly everything in the frame, especially the actors’ performances. Jackman’s wild-eyed expressions and grandiose delivery run into the flatness imposed on most of his subordinates, ultimately muting his energy and neutering his sense of evil. Garrett Hedlund positively stuns as a young James Hook; to call his performance bad would be both accurate and wholly inadequate. With hunched shoulders and an awkward crab walk, Hedlund ambles around scenes and speaks in a strangely phrased drawl. In practice, he looks and sounds like Jack Nicholson playing the part of Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate. While his willingness to commit suggests he is one of the few who knows this is meant for children, he comes off like a joke while playing a part that blatantly aspires to the noble scoundrel type of Han Solo. Rooney Mara attracted a great deal of controversy for being cast as Tiger Lily, but the film’s depiction of the native camp as multicultural dampens the outrage. (Though isn’t it ever so interesting that all but one part with more than a few lines belongs to a white actor?) Yet it is Mara who gives the film’s most honest performance: for all their flaws, Jackman’s and Hedlund’s work belongs to a movie for kids, but Mara’s disinterested flatness is the true reflection of this film’s soul, a substitution of energy and awe for purely functional plot delivery.
Joe Wright has always hidden the fundamental emptiness of his style behind the wall of great literature, though funnily enough he achieved the best results with Hanna, a more explicitly adult rendition of fairytale tropes. But Pan’s stagnant energy reveals the director as a flashy hack who mistakes the presence of overwhelming color and movement for actual blocking and choreography. As his camera winds and slices through action, it reveals giant setpieces but no guiding principle for their assembly and purpose. Someone who not only knew technique but also storytelling could have luxuriated in the wonderful art direction of the native camp, combing its multi-tiered, chromatic layout to observe rituals and action that gave viewers an insight into this community. Instead, it exists to be invaded and quickly razed, offering empty beauty solely so it can be destroyed. Likewise, a finale in a fairy kingdom swaps imagination for scale, crafting a blasé array of giant Pixum crystals that looks suspiciously like the Fortress of Solitude. Wright may fancy himself an Ophüls, but by the time Blackbeard enters the frame to a bewildering chant of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he slots himself closer to Baz Luhrmann.
Perhaps the only consistently rewarding aspect of the film, and the one case of something being updated to interesting effect, is Adeel Akhtar’s terrific performance as Smee. Retaining that character’s subservience and buoyant personality, Akhtar nonetheless highlights a critical quality of the character, that of the shrewdness underneath his lack of guile, and his ability to not only survive in the midst of powerful, evil men, but to thrive. Leaving his mouth hanging slightly open like a rat, the actor communicates both Smee’s craven self-preservation and his calculating intelligence. Akhtar updates the character while remaining true to his iconic self, but in every other respect the movie defers to the Pan people know and love in Hollywood’s endless shell game of withholding from a crowd in order to force them into forking over more cash for future installments. Recasting Peter and Hook as unlikely partners has the potential to open up a truly new story for the boy, but when the film ends with Peter portentously asking his chum if they’ll be friends forever, it marks not the end of an original tale but the laborious preamble to an exhausted one.