I guess that was a big part of people’s lives in the ’80s and ’90s. Man, there’s alot of movies about the big corporate acquisition conference call the guy is trying to get. And then of course the family goes on a vacation and he’s all aggravated because of the big corporate acquisition conference call. At least they could’ve changed it to a different sport! A tennis match or something. Most shitty movies just choose one of those two old saws, this one requires both. He neglects his family in the most obvious cliches possible: taking a business call during his daughter’s play (even more of a dick move in 1991 because of the effort required to haul around the giant phone), missing his son’s baseball game (also harder in 1991 because there was no app for missing the game). Grownup Peter Pan isn’t a relatable screwup like Bill Murray or maybe Nic Cage would’ve played. HOOK isn’t the worst idea, it’s just not a strong or focused one, and doesn’t seem to be carefully thought out. I mean, they’d been loading the gun for a long time, might as well close their eyes, take a couple spins and then pull the trigger. I don’t think anybody ever had a clear idea how or why to tell this story, but they went through with it anyway. a good one).įor a while Spielberg wasn’t gonna direct and the script was rewritten by other people, then he came back to it. Some reports claim he considered a musical version with Michael Jackson (obviously I wish that happened), but Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly that when he explained the plot of HOOK to him “Michael understood at that point it wasn’t the same Peter Pan he wanted to make.” (i.e. Spielberg didn’t originally set out to make a movie about Peter Pan as a grown up, he just wanted to make some kind of Peter Pan movie. I mean that’s fine, it doesn’t have to be about Hook, but I bring that up because I think it shows what part of what went wrong: it must’ve been developed to death. And it doesn’t seem like it’s focusing much on him or his legend, other than a short part after the kids have been kidnapped when they find a long scrape across the walls, like he came in and Freddy Kruegered the place. So he’s disappointed that Pan can’t fight anymore and he allows him time to re-train. There’s no new insight into Hook, his only semi-new trait is that he wants to have fun having a “war” with Pan more than he actually wants to kill him or avenge him for cutting off his hand. And they’re themes that specifically have to do with Pan’s character, not Hook’s.
These messages are a little relatable and alot hackneyed because of these type of studio family movies that could star Williams or Jim Carrey or Tim Allen or Adam Sandler. It’s all about a balanced approach to “growing up,” not losing the joy and imagination of a kid but also being a responsible father and husband because he’s a fucking adult. Instead HOOK is just a sequel to PETER PAN where years later an asshole corporate lawyer guy (Robin Williams) finds out he forgot he was Peter Pan and has to go to Never Neverland to save his kids from Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). Maybe we would learn about his struggles growing up, how he wrote his first hits, rose to the top of the charts, substance abuse, falling in love, the thing with the crocodile, etc. The title HOOK implies a new perspective on the PETER PAN tale, like we’re gonna see it from the pirate’s perspective, or even like it’s gonna be a Captain Hook biopic. One thing I noticed about HOOK: it’s not called PAN. What went wrong? Let’s try to figure it out. While by no means perfect, Wendy – which was made for a fraction of any of these other, well, panned endeavours – has originality, folklore, and old-school Americana to recommend it.HOOK, man. Wendy, Benh Zeitlin’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to the much-fancied Beasts of the Southern Wild, has scored middling notices and minuscule box-office to date. Pan, a $150 million fantasy from 2015, grossed just $128.3 million worldwide.ĭisney’s Peter Pan and Wendy, directed by the marvellous David Lowery, has been preemptively and sagely downgraded – for those still clinging to theatrical release as top tier – to a streaming exclusive next year. PJ Hogan’s 2003 Peter Pan was a box office turkey, Steven Spielberg’s Hook – despite harnessing all the comic pathos of Robin Williams – was a notorious flop. Nobody, apparently, wants to see a reboot of JM Barrie’s best-known creation. If If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, then Peter Pan is the Afghanistan of auteurial ambitions.
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