The title signifies that deeply special and mythical “Pan” down which all your cinematic hopes must be flushed. With no Frish. Or maybe there’s a missing “i” between the second and third letters.
This is a fantastically boring and parasitic origin-myth reboot of the Peter Pan story from people who don’t care how it got booted in the first place. It looks like a John Lewis Christmas TV ad dreamed up by executives who have found a way to smoke Ambien.
Peter (Levi Miller) is a tiresome golden-child orphan in second-world-war London with a cockerney accent that comes and goes: he is a special prophesied one whose mother’s name is Mary. OMG. Peter is kidnapped from his orphanage and taken to a mysterious land where, in what looks like a deleted scene from Mad Max: Fury Road, thousands of grubby slave-worker youths mine for magical fairy-related minerals. It is called Neverland and they sing along to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit … from their album Nevermind. Geddit? That single idea is enough to justify a 30-year prison sentence for all concerned. These poor souls are ruled over by wicked Captain Blackbeard, an ah-harr turn texted in by Hugh Jackman.
Peter revolts, assisted by doe-eyed Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily. Garrett Hedlund maintains his reputation for undemanding buttery handsomeness playing the young Hook, who at this stage is uninterestingly reimagined as Peter’s unreliable chum: a roguish roisterer with an Indiana Jones hat.
Peter is the boy who never grows up. But at the end of this, you’ll feel like you’ve aged about 800 years.
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