Review: PAN

PAN (FANTASY/ADVENTURE)
1.5 out of 4 stars
Directed by Joe Wright
Starring: Levi Miller, Garrett Hedlund, Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara, Adeel Akhtar, Nonso Anozie, Amanda Seyfried, Kathy Burke, Lewis MacDougall, Cara Delivinge, Tae-joo Na, Jack Charles, Bronson Webb, Paul Kaye
Rated PG for fantasy action violence, language and some thematic material.
111 minutes
Verdict: So bold in its colorful, absurd style and so sincere in its hackneyed "chosen one" plot that it almost seems wrong to ridicule, PAN is the fun "WTF is this?" kind of bad movie, but bad, regardless.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN PAN IF YOU LIKED:
PETER PAN  (2003)
HOOK  (1991)
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE  (2005)
ANNA KARENINA  (2012)
ALICE IN WONDERLAND  (2010)

I'm thinking of a word that describes Joe Wright's PAN that starts with 'batshi' and ends with 'tinsane'.  It's kind of like MAD MAX: FURY ROAD's awkward fraternal twin that wound up without the brains or beauty.  For both, Warner Brothers approved a $150 million sum to a filmmaker with a distinct vision to go hog-wild, and both are highly stylish, very bold products, but where that worked so marvelously to create a brilliant masterpiece in FURY ROAD, PAN is a brilliant failure.  PAN is a bad movie, but it is such a beautifully absurd bad movie that it's hard to not be amused.
A more absurd prequel than HOOK was an absurd sequel, PAN begins in World War II (an unexpected time to start a Peter Pan origin story, not only about 25 years after Sir J.M. Barrie first penned Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, but also a few years after Barrie's death) London, where young Peter (newcomer Levi Miller, who's harmless but super low-key in a sea of over-the-top performances) is one of many boys in an orphanage run by surprisingly malicious nuns who apparently have an arrangement selling orphans into slavery to Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman, in a deliriously big performance), who takes the boys back to Neverland to mine for "pixum", aka "fairy dust".  When they take Peter however, Blackbeard believes he may be the "Pan", the one prophesied to destroy him, so before Blackbeard can kill him, Peter escapes the mines with a fellow miner, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund, perpetually growling like an ax-wielding Jack Nicholson).  To further learn of his prophesied destiny, Peter and Hook go to the "Indians" (I don't remember if they were ever referred to as such, but Tiger Lily is caucasian and the rest are a multi-cultural/multi-racial stew who explode into colorful chalk dust clouds when killed), led by warrior princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara), who hold the secret of Peter's heritage and the fabled fairy kingdom filled with pixum.  So, yeah.

PAN has a lot of big laughs, but they're generally of the incredulous "Oh my hell, I can't believe nobody stepped in to say 'Stop! Don't do that'" sort.  Actually, that kind of artistic audacity is commendable and not in itself a bad thing, but it all makes for a bigger, grander misfire when the more fundamental elements are so clunky.  The rushed-through story is a hackneyed run-through of the same "chosen one" formula that THE LEGO MOVIE so aptly sent up last year, taken with such total sincerity and shameless weirdness that it shouldn't be made fun of, but Blackbeard is introduced while forcing his thousands of quarry slaves to sing "Smells Like Teen Spirit", just because, and so it's hard not to.  It's not a terrible movie, however it is a bad one, and yet, it's bad in that wonderful midnight movie "What the #*$% am I watching?" fashion that can be a lot of fun in its own way.  Unfortunately, the family audiences this is gunning for rarely goes in for that sort of thing.