Movies
Peter Pan (2003)
Well, it's better than Hook, anyhow. And it meets the need, if any, for a live-action version of J.M. Barrie's children's classic in state-of-the-art 21st-century technology. Or as the ad line puts it: "The timeless story as you've never seen it before," meaning, for example, that by means of Forrest Gump-ian magic we get to see, for the first time, Hook's stump. Jeremy Sumpter brings to the role of The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up a crackingly adolescent voice, Ludivine Sagnier mugs like mad as Tinker Bell (but needn't speak), Rachel Hurd-Wood is a fresh face as Wendy, and Jason Isaacs -- following the specifications of the original stage play -- embodies both the timid Mr. Darling and the dastardly Capt. Hook to indecipherable Freudian purpose. (Is there not something vaguely vaginal about the CG crocodile whose gaping maw swallows Hook whole? -- after having previously symbolically castrated him? Doesn't it almost compensate for the abandoned theatrical tradition of casting a woman as Peter?) Australian-born filmmaker P.J. Hogan has a surplus of energy, proficiency, resource, capital, and such, and a shortage only of taste. The aggregate effect is to make the story, for those who know it, feel very long: half an hour just to get to Never Land. With Olivia Williams, Lynn Redgrave, Richard Briers. 2003.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: PG
