Critics reviews

Pan gets off to an enjoyable start... But it's while in Neverland that both narrative and character interest begin to falter. The nature of Peter's mission is muddled, and what was a Boy's Own adventure becomes a story cluttered with adult performers of strikingly different tones.

The only person who seems to be having any fun is Jackman; at least he gets to be weird. But even that's mostly consigned to his early scenes. As the film continues, and piles predictable action scenes atop borrowed plot points, he just becomes just another baddie lost in the visual cacophony — a glorified cutaway. His flamboyant persona is no match for the drudgery of this movie, which careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.

Pan doesn't fail for lack of trying, but rather the opposite. Director Joe Wright has always been an exceptionally bold stylist, and it's paid off most of the time... But a world as densely populated as Neverland doesn't need the outrageous flourishes Wright piles on top of it, and it bends from the weight of all that too-muchness. The action is so frenetic, the eye doesn't know where to go.

Sometimes, the aspect ratio switches so that swords can pop out over the edge of the frame; at other points, the color palette gets graded down into the cyan-and-warm-tones look of primitive two-strip Technicolor, à la The Aviator. It's hard to make the case that any of this means anything, or is even supposed to, and how much a given viewer gets out of Pan is probably proportional to how much they enjoy pure bric-a-brac and the occasional silly sight gag.

Loud, chaotic action dominates this unnecessary prequel to Peter Pan... Director Joe Wright (Atonement) demonstrates little feel for the fantastic material, setting a slow, plodding pace and eliciting zero chemistry from his cast; the rare moments of levity feel woefully forced.

It's one thing to play with detail, but it's another to fundamentally alter the heart of your story... In that tumbling, chaotic rush to be at its most imaginative, its most magical, Wright's Pan has somehow identified itself as completely antithetical to what Peter Pan should represent. It's like rewriting Atlas Shrugged as a Communist pamphlet. It just doesn't feel right.

Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.

The main thing holding it back, in addition to the needlessly sidelined female roles, is that all-too-modern impulse to anticipate a sequel before it's even been made, with a few too many winks to the classic story it precedes and the plot turns it will have to take to arrive there. The real delight is in the innovation with which it goes about reshaping both the source material and the big-budget Hollywood mold.

Bright production design and a keen sense of movement make the movie a pleasant-enough watch, but can't mask the obvious: this is an origin story to a familiar narrative, with all the world-building and nods and winks that follow.

Pan tells a rollicking story of its own, without worrying too much about getting the pieces in place for Barrie's own work, or the much-loved Disney animation it also inspired.