By Bob Garver<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cPan,\u201d the well-meaning prequel to \u201cPeter Pan,\u201d already has a reputation as one of the biggest critical and commercial flops of the year. Honestly, it\u2019s not that bad. The kids at my screening actually seemed to be eating it up. I almost want to give it a good review to somewhat balance out all the scathing reviews I\u2019ve read. But it wouldn\u2019t be fair to do that. The overall product may not be terrible, but there\u2019s no getting around certain baffling creative decisions.<\/p>\n
Peter (Levi Miller) lives a depressing yet optimistic life in an orphanage until one night when he\u2019s abducted by pirates. He\u2019s shuttled through time and space (and I mean outer space, he very well might be going to another planet) to Neverland, where he finds himself in the employ of feared pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). Blackbeard puts Peter to work in a mine, where the supervisor is Smee (Adeel Akhtar) and one of his fellow miners is two-handed adult James Hook (Garrett Hedlund).<\/p>\n
Peter gets in trouble for a minor offense and survives an execution attempt, which gets him in even more trouble. He, Smee, and Hook escape only to find themselves in even more trouble from the island\u2019s natives, overseen by Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara). Tiger Lily notices that Peter has The Pan, a pendant given to him by his mother (Amanda Seyfried), that marks him as the tribe\u2019s greatest warrior and the person destined to defeat Blackbeard. There\u2019s some doubt over whether or not Peter should really have The Pan, and Peter himself doubts that he\u2019s really The Chosen One. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s more aggravating: waiting for Peter to inevitably turn into Peter Pan, or waiting for the resolution of yet another hackneyed \u201cChosen One\u201d storyline.<\/p>\n
The movie does do a few things right. The chipper Levi Miller is everything you want in a Peter Pan. Jackman as Blackbeard shows some early promise that sadly is soon squandered, but I\u2019ll count it anyway. Surprisingly, my favorite scenes are the ones in the orphanage, where the mischievous Peter skirts the authority of an overbearing nun (Kathy Burke). The nun, it turns out, has some kind of business deal worked out with the pirates, and I was itching to know more details about their arrangement.<\/p>\n
But then there are the things that the movie does wrong, and it does them conspicuously wrong. The special effects range from bad (unconvincing CGI sets and backgrounds) to worse (Jackman\u2019s face being swallowed by his makeup) to worst (phony-looking bird puppets you won\u2019t believe were approved as a finished product). There are musical performances of \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d and \u201cBlitzkrieg Bop\u201d for no fathomable reason. Hook has to fight for his life in a trampoline battle that is supposed to be funny because it\u2019s slapstick, but is silly because\u2026 why a trampoline? Perhaps most distracting of all is Garrett Hedlund\u2019s cowboy-inspired Hook voice. There\u2019s a line of his in one of the trailers for this film that sounds like it\u2019s been badly dubbed-over. Many speculated that it was to avoid a swear word that appears in the actual film, but the truth is that he sounds like that the entire time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s frustrating to see \u201cPan\u201d fail so often when it\u2019s clearly aiming to be more than junk food. It\u2019s an ambitious film that never feels like it\u2019s trying to \u201ccash in\u201d on the Peter Pan name. But one inescapable failure after another adds up to a movie that isn\u2019t so much \u201cbad\u201d as it is disappointing.<\/p>\n
Two Stars out of Five<\/p>\n
\u201cPan\u201d is rated PG for fantasy action violence, language and thematic material. Its running time is 111 minutes.<\/p>\n