PAN.
Finally saw this thing in its entirety as it was meant to be experienced... on a Transatlantic flight after I'd already watched all the better movies that were available. Holy sh**balls was this thing a turd. You know, I've been posting a lot the past couple weeks about how terrible Batman v. Superman is. So it's just fitting that the film that took BvS's place when it was moved back a year was somehow an even BIGGER clusterf**k of a film, chock full of bad special effects, weak plot points and some cringeworthy (I hate using that word but it's soooooooooooooo appropriate here) acting.
Hugh Jackman should have been an epic Blackbeard, shouldn't he? I mean, look at the guy. He could have been a truly memorable villain. Well, I suppose that's not accurate; he's certainly memorable here... just not for the reasons you'd want him to be. He struts around in about 10 pounds of makeup, occasionally belting out Nirvana lyrics because WHY NOT? IT WORKED IN MOULIN ROUGE, DIDN'T IT? Good God, what an over-the-top, hammy performance. Yet I can't blame Jackman, because damn near EVERYONE in this film delivers an over-the-top, hammy performance. Subtlety doesn't exist to these actors. Did I mention Garrett Hedlund? Let's talk about Garrett Hedlund! My God, did he take this role on just to commit career suicide? Because he seems to think he's playing Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones was a cowardly sh**head who gives up on archeology to be a used car salesman. I've seen Hedlund in quite a few things and I've never thought he was a bad actor; I know a lot of people didn't care for Tron: Legacy but I enjoyed him in it. But here? Someone just feed this guy to a crocodile already. The only explanation I can give for his performance is that somewhere after he got locked into doing this movie, he realized it was a pile of sh** and he just decided to turn in a performance worthy of the worst actor in a middle school play. Every line he spews is so obviously "acted" that you might be tempted to start writing letters to casting directors, pleading with them to never put him in a movie again.
I suppose Rooney Mara and the kid who played Peter (sorry, not going to bother looking up his name) fair a bit better because they're a tad more understated than the rest of the a**holes surrounding them, but that somehow makes it WORSE because they feel like they belong in a different movie. Mara in particular is hard to take serious when she's delivering morose lines about sacred prophesies and lives at stake while she's wearing a tie-dyed Raggedy Ann wig on her head.
But the chief offender here... the architect of all of this bullsh** and the one who deserves the most blame... must be director Joe Wright. Seriously, how do you go from Atonement to this? I saw Hanna. It wasn't spectacular, but it was nowhere near this level of absolute absurdity. I haven't seen Anna Karenina, but I've heard it's good. But PAN? My God, what was he thinking? From the aforementioned Nirvana musical number to the cartoonish CGI Dr. Seuss birds to the cartoonish CGI Peter Pan flying to the stupid costumes and makeup to whitewashing Tiger Lily to inexplicably moving Peter Pan's story forward in time... NOTHING in this movie works. I don't know about you, but I think that the whole "boy who could fly" prophecy would be a lot more effective if everyone didn't have magical SHIP that could inexplicably fly (at first it seems like it has something to do with the sails, but then I guess they abandoned that concept because Hook finds a ship late in the movie that pretty much has no sails at all and gets it to work). I seriously wonder if Wright was drunk when he directed this thing. I see that he has no new projects lined up. GOOD. GO AWAY. NEVER DIRECT ANYTHING AGAIN. I HOPE YOU GO BROKE AND BECOME ADDICTED TO METH.
Anyway, I could go on for hours about how terrible this movie was, but I'll stop there. But I seriously wonder how sh** like this even gets made. Who would greenlight something this awful?
1/10