Come back, Steven Spielberg's Hook! All is forgiven.
Unintentionally named for the reviews it has already begun to attract, Joe Wright's Pan seems set to confirm that JM Barrie's most famous creation has no currency outside the 20th century.
Then again, the connections between the original Peter Pan and this inconsistent, blankly scripted farrago are so tangled that it barely figures in such conversations. You may as well draw conclusions about Peter’s contemporary relevance by staring up the back end of a horse.
When does it become clear that we're being swept up by a proper disaster? The absurd dogfight between a flying pirate ship and hurtling spitfires would be idiotic enough even if it didn't bungle tributes to both A Matter of Life and Death and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Far worse is the scene that finds Hugh Jackman's Blackbeard leading his cohorts in a rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Well, it certainly smells like something.
This isn't even a new bad idea. Baz Luhrmann made similar mistakes with Nirvana in Moulin Rouge. At least, the Australian didn't compound the catastrophe by following it up – as Wright and his team do here – with a bawl through The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop.
As you will have gathered, the script confuses us by moving the prequel forward to the second World War. Peter (a competent Levi Miller), abandoned by his mother, lives in an orphanage run by an evil Irish nun (the flat dialogue ultimately defeats even Kathy Burke).
He is abducted by pirates and taken to a version of Neverland fatally in thrall to tonal inconsistency. Blackbeard’s mines looks like something from Joseph Conrad. As a culturally insensitive Tiger Lily, Rooney Mara lives in an 11-year-old’s birthday party outfitted from a eurostore. The psychedelic cartoon birds are . . . something.
Odder still is the puzzling presence of Garrett Hedlund as Hook. Playing the character as a combination of Indiana Jones and the sort of bad fake American who advertises “real burgers” on Irish radio, the Australian offers no hint whatsoever – not even a whisper – that he later becomes a malign presence. That will come out in the sequel, I suppose.
Stop sniggering at the back.
