Pan: 3/10

Of all the films to be released in 2015, Pan is the one the least amount of people were asking for (mind you, we also received a third Fantastic Four adaptation in August). Who wants a prequel to Peter Pan, for goodness’ sake? Joe Wright’s abysmal CGI fest is another example of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel. What’s next, another Jungle Book movie? Oh, wait.

I’ll admit, I had hopes that the film would be at least half decent, seeing as Joe Wright was in the director’s chair. He has an impressive body of work behind him, all of which show off a unique sense of rhythm and attention to ravishing scenery, with his most compelling work probably being the tragic Word War II romance, Atonement. However, his talents to not translate well to blockbuster entertainment. Pan contains a few striking shots here and there, but it is muddled in an overly complex (and clumsily executed) storyline, phoned in performances, and an overabundance of hollow computer-generated thrills over real suspense and adventure.

The film stars Hugh Jackman as the nefarious Blackbeard the Pirate, and although he tries slightly more than the other actors to actually make the scenes interesting, his scenery-chewing performance does nothing to heighten the overall experience. Levi Miller is a competent-enough child actor, but his role as Peter Pan is sucked dry by an uninspired “chosen one” origin story that never has us guessing what may happen next. I suppose that’s the biggest problem with prequels in general. We know how the story ends, so there is no sense of danger, and no one really cares what’s happening. The most confusing character is Captain Hook, played by Garrett Hedlund in the worst John Wayne impression you’ve ever heard. What makes his role so confusing is that he plays a well-meaning cowboy, and he stays that way. The fact that he never becomes Peter Pan’s sworn enemy over the course of the film makes me shudder, because it probably means Warner Bros. is planning to make a franchise out of this mess. But don’t relax just yet, because things get worse. Rooney Mara rounds up the main cast as an inexplicably white Tiger Lily surrounded by Native American stereotypes. She wears an over-the-top headdress and flashy makeup, just to hammer home the point that whoever wrote this film probably stopped paying attention in school right around the fourth grade.

Somehow, Tiger Lily’s whitewashing is not the most ridiculous aspect of the movie. Upon boarding the flying pirate ship at the start of the film, Peter witnesses a dogfight between the magical pirates and the Royal Air Force, because anything goes these days, apparently. Afterward, we are whisked away to Neverland and tortured with a scene that looks like it was ripped straight from a Cartoon Network TV show that was trying too hard to be weird. Our introduction to Blackbeard features him and his crew singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is turning in his grave, and I don’t blame him for putting himself there.

Pan earns three of of ten on my grading system. Calling this film generic is difficult, but that’s exactly what it is. It perfectly encapsulates the modern Hollywood blockbuster: unoriginal, incomprehensible, boring, and void of any real excitement. I do not give it one star, however, because it is the harmless kind of stupid, and everyone will forget about it in a few weeks. It is currently tanking at the box office and I’m praying that Warner Bros. will cancel any planned sequels. Good riddance, Neverland.