Review of Pan (2015) by Manny C — 24 Oct 2015

You know it's bad when you're watching the umpteenth movie variation on Peter Pan and you are longing to see NBC's live musical version instead. Or even Finding Neverland on Broadway. Till now, the lamest movie version was 2003's limp Peter Pan, and before that Steven Spielberg's not-as-great-as-it-looks Hook. Now there's a new champion and it goes by the name of director Joe Wright's Pan.

Peter, played by 12-year-old Aussie actor Levi Miller (he steals a film not worth stealing), has been wasting away in a London orphanage during the Nazi blitzkrieg. Things don't improve much when nuns sell off Peter and his fellow orphans to the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman, all ham, little else). Then things take off on a flying ship to a steampunk-ish Neverland where kids are used as child labor to produce Pixum, the street name for crystallized pixie dust that works as a sort of Fountain of Youth for Blackbeard.

Jackman's pirate drag didn't need a chorus of Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', but it happens anyways, as does a buccaneer take on the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop'. Blackbeard is convinced Peter is the flying boy destined to free the child allies of his soon-to-be pirate enemy James Hook (Garrett Hedlund) and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara), the only white girl in a multicultural brand of rabble-rousers. Fairies are also present if you believe in that sort of thing, until Blackbeard tries killing them with a blowtorch. Seriously.

Joe Wright is typically a filmmaker worth following anywhere, just check Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna, Anna Karenina, even The Soloist, but is Pan is too underwhelming and top-heavy. The script from Jason Fuchs doesn't help at all, nor the lame CGI and shitty 3-D effects. Peter Pan has never looked so lifeless and joyless.