Growing up is such a barbarous business.

Peter Pan

(2003)

(SPOILERS) The advent of the latest, disastrous, iteration of JM Barrie’s classic had me wondering if the whole idea of translating the story to screen is doomed, and that Disney simply got lucky first time. So in dutifully investigating a few previous versions, I began with one I hadn’t caught before; PJ Hogan’s commendably faithful attempt, as much as Joe Wright’s is entirely disrespectful. Well, partially commendably. Perhaps a mid-ground between diligence to the original text and invention is the optimum path, as Hogan’s picture is admirable in many respects – and vastly superior to Wright’s – but still fails to quite distil magic.

Pan can take some comfort that this Peter was no more successful; some sources give it as being even more expensive (adjusting for inflation); $130m budget according to Wikipedia, while Box Office Mojo offers a more conservative $100m. Either way, that’s not peanuts. The outlay seems the more absurd given that Peter Pan conspires to follow the tradition of other live action adaptations, such that it looks highly artificial, limited and stage-bound for much of the time. The effects are very variable, ranging from the rather good (the crocodile) to the not so (London and Neverland look like advent calendar animations, such that one wonders if this was intentional). You’re left wondering where all the money went (some blame the art department eating up the budget and causing overruns).

One is also led to speculate whether Hogan, being Australian, has a natural affinity for ungainly slapstick, and if that’s common to his fellow nationals or just the ones with his surname. Probably not the latter, as there are points where this could have been directed by Baz Lurhmann, such is the frenetically whacky action (which, lacking comic timing, makes it mostly unfunny). Peter (Jeremy Sumpter), darting about after his shadow, or Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier) flitting hither and thither and pulling exaggerated faces is more suggestive of Drop Dead Fred than a hallowed classic (Hogan wrote the screenplay with Michael Goldenberg, also credited with the adaption of Contact, the fourth Harry Potter and – ahem – Green Lantern).

But Peter Pan is also quite deferent to the source material, getting to grips with the highs and lows of a boy who refuses to grow up (“Will they send me to school. And then, to an office? Then I shall be a man”; succinctly put), the tragic side of that position, his strange oedipal longing for Wendy (he and the Lost Boys wish to adopt her as their mother, while they see him as their father; “Mother and father are fighting again”), and her consequent distress that he feels nothing for her.

The screenplay even lends Hook substance, a man whose greatest fear is loneliness and who is even able to commiserate with Wendy at one point (and she, indicative that she wants more than Peter is willing to offer, finds him entrancing) and plot with Tinkerbell.

Which rather shows up the picture’s biggest failing. It’s highly episodic, and often incidental, taking in escapes, captures, being entertained by Hook, and his attempt to poison Peter; all of them are accurate to Barrie’s sacred text but fail to finesse themselves into a picture with much momentum. There’s also the issue of serving stage play elements that don’t perhaps works so well on the big screen (all together now; “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do”). It’s a mistake to trust goodwill in the theatrical template, and the panto aspects of Peter Pan can’t necessarily be relied upon to win over little rascals in an alternate medium.

Such was their studiousness, Hogan and Goldenberg even shot an ultimately unused epilogue where Peter returns to Wendy. Peeved that she is now grown and married, he takes her daughter to Neverland as his new “mother”. What is included, in contrast to Wright, who blanched at the implications, is Tiger Lilly being an Indian, or a “savage”; Hogan is happy to go there. Probably, again, because he’s Australian, and insensitive to such things.

Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) John (Harry Newell) and Michael (Freddie Popplewell) all provide creditable performances, the former particularly so (Hurd-Wood is the only one of the trio who has acted since). They’re all impossibly posh, another aspect Wright eschewed with his ragamuffin Peter. Who is here played by the very Californian (or Aryan, as you will) looking Jeremy Sumpter. His American twang gives the character a kind of inverse exoticism, I guess. Sumpter certainly handles the role better than Levi Miller would recently. Nevertheless, he still isn’t really able to lend much depth to the character. Hogan, for all his willingness to chart a course for the dark side, is too enamoured of the fizzy pop elements to abide there for long.

The adults mostly score solidly. Jason Isaacs cuts a better Hook than Darling. Indeed, as the former he comes on like a dishevelled ex-rock star, and one might think he’d been watching Johnny Depp had this not come out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean. His Hook is mostly great fun, differentiated and worthy by being more dangerous and inelegant than Hoffman’s incarnation. The most memorable lines are his (“Growing up is such a barbarous business”, mocking Peter’s ephemerality in the eyes of others; “There is another in your place. He is called husband”), and as he opines that Pan will “die alone and unloved, just like me”, you almost feel sympathy for the brute. As Darling, a man who has put his dreams away in a drawer, to sacrifice them for his family, he’s more successful as the repressed man than the one who rediscovers himself in the final scene.

Richard Briers makes a genial fist of things as an elderly Smee, even breaking the fourth wall at one point (“Very exciting, two dead already”). Olivia Williams, and particularly Lynn Redgrave (as a specially created character, Aunt Millicent) are affecting, while Saffron Burrows’ narration is perfectly pitched. But, while this a well-intentioned adaptation, and it’s unlikely the planned Disney live-action retake will be anywhere near as observant of the finer details, Hogan lacks the vision to bring it off. It may be that the material defeats the medium, that the heightened manner of the stage or animation is a better canvas. It certainly got the better of Spielberg, and everyone thought he would be the perfect fit. Peter Pan feels like Hogan inhaled a mouthful of fairy dust and spat it across the screen; it’s brightly coloured and energetic, but also garish and visually undisciplined.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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