Before Neverland

If the names Mary Martin and Walt Disney top the Peter Pan pantheon, and if Hook — Spielberg’s nadir — remains forever anchored at the bottom of Mermaid Lagoon, then Joe Wright’s Pan ranks somewhere between P.J. Hogan’s passable 2003 telling and NBC’s laughable Peter Pan Live!

For the first 30 minutes of this prequel to the J.M. Barrie classic, we follow Peter (Levi Miller) through war-torn London as he progresses from orphanage doorstep to Blackbeard’s (Hugh Jackman, pouring on the camp) flying pirate ship. Breaking into the office of Mother Barnabas (played with gruesomely fearful gusto by Kathy Burke), Peter finds not only a food hoarder, but a profiteer selling children into a life of piratical servitude. This nun’s got nothing on Planned Parenthood.

Before making it to Neverland, Peter and Blackbeard’s assembly of fresh recruits — plucked from their sleep by bungeed buccaneers — must first pass through a excitingly staged WWII bombing raid. Their arrival is greeted by a society of orphans singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and later “Blitzkreig Bop.” Song-and-dance man Jackman apparently had a clause in his contract that calls for musical numbers, no matter how ridiculously out of context the placement is.

Kids die — a sure indication this is not a product of the Disney factory. (A plank-walking plummet, spurred by Blackbeard’s boot, may be too intense for toddlers.) Killing pixies doesn’t present as much of a challenge, particularly when their demise results in various shades of Technicolor dust the second the bullet hits.

Miller does more than just look the part of a young DiCaprio, bringing to the character the right combination of pluck and leadership to make it fly. Garrett Hedlund’s Hook — he gets to keep his hand for the inevitable sequel — owes much to Indy, while Rooney Mara transforms every one of Tiger Lily’s moves into an exercise in exotica.

Wright refuses to follow one dominant color scheme, which helps stimulate the visuals, but you know there’s trouble ahead when the pixels begin to outnumber the pixies. If Atonement, Wright’s neatest work to date, is a master class on CGI restraint, Pan’s densely pixielated final battle is busy to the point of indecipherability.

Wright’s third acts continue to go wrong, most notably in the case of Hanna. Unable to pan Pan, my sincerest wish is still that the director put aside the fairy tales and return his attention to romantic melodrama.