This review could just be a picture of my facial expression when 12-year-old orphan Peter (Levi Miller) arrives in Neverland and finds Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman, ending almost every sentence with CAPITAL LETTERS AND FIVE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!) leading a sea of puzzlingly reverential young men in singing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” despite the pirate saying that he fears an uprising. “Walking on Sunshine” might be a less angst-fueling choice, pal.
It’s far from the only baffling decision in “Pan,” director Joe Wright’s (“Atonement”) apparent attempt to do a Baz Luhrmann (“The Great Gatsby”) version of several Disney rides at once. Where this year’s “Cinderella” reboot was outrageously straightforward, “Pan” is all flair, a cockamamie origin story for J.M. Barrie’s adventure that Hollywood refuses to let go. (Remember the 2003 version? Didn’t think so.) It shows both that Jackman learned nothing from the failure of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and that you don’t need to have any allegiance to source material when concocting an oppressive spectacle simply for the sake of charging for 3-D glasses.
In Neverland, Peter meets James Hook (Garrett Hedlund, embarrassing himself as some kind of yearning Yosemite Sam), whose name outrageously foreshadows that a crocodile turning Captain’s Hook hand into lunch was only irony, not the creation of a nickname. There’s a war going on or something—I got lost amid brain-tangling ideas such as Tiger Lily, the leader of the group Blackbeard calls “savages” who seems to pick some of her apparel from Bjork’s closet, being whitewashed and played by Rooney Mara, whose accent shows the courage of the film finally representing that most unseen of tribes, the English.
A prophecy indicates that Peter’s the chosen one in this land because what a shame it would be if every children’s movie didn’t resemble “Harry Potter” in some way. (It’s sorta like “The Lego Movie” played straight.) The sometimes-visually impressive “Pan” also recalls the “Indiana Jones” franchise and “Wild Wild West,” and even “Lord of the Rings” when it turns out that Smee’s real name is Sam Smiegel. Is his middle name Gollum?
As for lessons, Peter takes pride only in his lineage, not in any other sort of duty, undermining the effort to make him believe in himself even if he’s not the golden child. He’s given a necklace as a baby, which not only appears to get bigger as he ages but which we’re also supposed to believe is never confiscated by an army of evil nuns. Seconds after Saturn appears to be the size of a person, there’s a crotch gag. Ahhhhh!!!!!!!! Said it before, will say it again: Leave our childhood alone.
0.5 stars (out of four)
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