In a sentenceOrphans sing Nirvana down a mine, Hugh Jackman wears rouge, and the boy who flies is the least interesting person in Neverland
London, during the Blitz. Peter (Levi Miller), left as a baby on the steps of an orphanage, is now twelve and in the care of Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke), who hoards the rations and sells her charges to pirates. One night a galleon drops out of the clouds, pirates haul sleeping boys up on ropes, and the ship climbs away past the barrage balloons with Spitfires on its tail. In Neverland the boys are marched into a vast mine where thousands of kidnapped children dig for pixum, the fairy dust that Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) craves. Peter is put to work beside a miner called James Hook (Garrett Hedlund) and a wheedling informer, Smee (Adeel Akhtar), and hears of a prophecy about a boy who can fly.
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Joe Wright’s prequel asks how Peter Pan came to fly and answers with 111 minutes of airships, singalongs and Hugh Jackman in rouge. It is handsome, loud and joyless, and the boy at its centre is given nothing to want.
Joe Wright’s Pan wants to tell us where Peter Pan came from. Jason Fuchs’s screenplay starts with a baby on the steps of a London orphanage, jumps to the Blitz, and has the boy (Levi Miller) kidnapped by pirates in a flying galleon and dropped into a Neverland mine, where Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) works thousands of stolen children digging for fairy dust. There Peter meets a miner called James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and we are meant to watch a friendship begin that we know will end badly. It is good to look at, loud, and short on joy, and the boy at the centre of it is given almost nothing to want. Most critics have found it poor. So have we.
What works is Jackman, and he works hard. Blackbeard first appears on a gantry above the mine while hundreds of boys chant ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ up at him, and Jackman, face powdered white and cheeks rouged like a pantomime dame, takes the noise as though he had written the song. He plays the man as a tyrant who is also the manager of a music hall, snarling and simpering in the same breath, and whenever he is on screen the film knows what it is. We laughed at the singalong, in the right place for once, and we were sorry when it ended, because the film never tries anything that odd again.
Miller is a serious, open-faced child and he is not the problem. The problem is that Fuchs has written Peter a single wish, to find his mother, and then has every adult in Neverland repeat it back to him. Hedlund plays Hook as a cowboy, hat and drawl and every line pushed out through his teeth, and the manner never settles into a person; he is doing a voice for 111 minutes. The two spend most of the film telling each other they are friends. Rooney Mara’s Tiger Lily is the film’s worst decision, a white actress as the princess of Neverland’s native tribe, and dressing that tribe in every colour of the paint shop does not hide it. Mara is capable of a great deal elsewhere. Here she is given a bow, a scowl and some lines about destiny.
The craft is where the money went, and some of it shows. Aline Bonetto’s mine is a quarry the size of a city, scaffolding and rope bridges and thousands of children on them, and it is the one place in the film that looks lived in. John Mathieson and Seamus McGarvey are both credited with the photography, and the best stretch is the earliest: the galleon climbing out of the London sky with Spitfires behind it, shot clearly enough that we could tell which ship was which and which way was up. Once we reach Neverland the colour is turned up and we often could not tell what was hitting what. Pirates who die burst into clouds of coloured powder, which is how a PG film kills people, and after the third puff a battle looks like a fireworks display. Jacqueline Durran dresses the pirates in patched coats and odd hats, each man as if he had robbed a different century, and that is the best of her work here.
William Hoy and Paul Tothill cut the action fast, and John Powell’s score, brass and chorus, runs under nearly all of it, so there is barely a quiet minute. We were bored for the whole of the middle third, the stretch between leaving the mine and the finale, and bored in a particular way: everything on screen was moving and nothing was happening. The crocodile, the mermaids (all of them Cara Delevingne) and the fairies glimpsed late on are each introduced, looked at and left behind, like exhibits.
Wright has always liked a set piece. Anna Karenina (2012) was staged inside a theatre and the device carried it, because the story underneath was Tolstoy’s. Here there is no story underneath, only a prophecy and a missing mother, and the set pieces have nothing to hang from. He has made a film about a boy who learns to fly in which the moment he does is the one time the camera stops to look at him.
Children, for whom the PG certificate says this was made, will have the airships and the singing and may be perfectly content. Adults will have Jackman and about twenty minutes. It opened in Britain on 16 October 2015. The audience it was built for deserved a Peter who wanted something more than to be told who he was.
Most critics reject Pan, and firmly: nineteen of the twenty-four reviews are negative, and the complaints repeat from one to the next. The prequel, they say, drains the whimsy from the Peter Pan story and puts nothing in its place but noise. Where praise exists it clusters around Hugh Jackman, whose Blackbeard is singled out again and again as the one thing on screen with any energy, and around Levi Miller, whom several find assured even when the film around him is not. The production design and a few staged set pieces earn grudging credit.
The reservations are broad: an overstuffed origin story, cluttered and garish CGI, bland characters, long action sequences and heavy hints at sequels. A couple of British reviews also object to Rooney Mara’s casting as Tiger Lily. The spread is wide only because of two outliers: The New Yorker calls it Joe Wright’s best film, and the Radio Times finds it an irreverent delight. Nobody else gets near them.
Lane calls Pan a cheering surprise and Joe Wright’s best film so far, praising its lively, tightly packed adventures. He singles out Hugh Jackman’s performance as the film’s true highlight.
Read the full review →Jones calls the prequel an irreverent delight, giving it a positive verdict. He singles out Hugh Jackman’s charismatic Blackbeard and the film’s playful mix of movie influences.
Read the full review →The page is identified as a review of Pan (2015), but its text is unavailable. The critic’s verdict and specific praise or complaint cannot be verified.
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Read the full review →Loughrey finds the prequel heartless and antithetical to the spirit of Peter Pan. She praises its imaginative vibrancy but criticizes Rooney Mara’s casting as Tiger Lily and the film’s cultural appropriation.
Read the full review →The critic finds Pan a middling, uninvolving adventure that strips away the source material’s magic without replacing it. The visual design and costumes stand out, but weak drama, irritating performances, and poor CGI undermine the film.
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Peter Pan · not reviewed yetP.J. Hogan’s straight telling of the book, with a Hook who is properly frightening.
HookSpielberg’s grown-up Peter is the other Pan film that wonders about beginnings, and finds more.
Castle in the SkyMiyazaki’s sky pirates and floating city, with the wonder this film keeps promising.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen · not reviewed yetTerry Gilliam’s flying galleons and painted skies, built by hand and all the better for it.
Wendy · not reviewed yetBenh Zeitlin’s Neverland on a Louisiana island, small and strange where this is large and loud.
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