You've got to hand it to Peter Pan & Wendy, the live-action Disney remake very few people talk about. It answers the interesting question whether a Peter Pan adaptation with a good Hook can still be bad. The answer, unfortunately, is yes.
There are just too many things that don't work. Neverland doesn't look particularly magical. Peter himself is somewhat muted, and doesn't come across as a charismatic leader. Wendy's never swept away by him; you can certainly allow yourself to have a bit of conflict between Peter and Wendy, but she has to be into him before she starts to question him. I try to disregard the display of modern pieties in light entertainment to some extent, because otherwise I'd have practically no light entertainment to enjoy. But Peter Pan & Wendy parades its 2020s moralism so blatantly that it hurts the story and is impossible to ignore.
For instance, we really don't need a girl quota of "lost boys". J.M. Barrie actually offered an explanation as to why there weren't any lost girls: the lost boys were babies who fell out of their prams, and little girls weren't foolish enough to do that. Which, yes, is a bit patronising, but not more so than a scene where Wendy points out "But you're not all boys", only to be answered with an aggressive "So?" Call them lost children if necessary, but for my money being a lost boy, trailing after Peter Pan and following his orders, isn't that much of a privilege – we needn't covet it. There are still plenty of female characters in Neverland: Wendy, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, the mermaids (plus, I must reluctantly point out, the crocodile was actually female in the original story). I don't mind a couple of women pirates, though, and a multicultural bunch of lost boys is fine; it's easy to imagine that Peter's recruitment field was wider than the British Isles (and I'm not sure I buy the pram story, seeing how he lured away the Darling siblings).
Speaking of Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily, they are also victims of the filmmakers' good intentions (or moral vanity, take your pick). Tinkerbell can be black, no problem – it was Disney themselves who popularised the blond pigtail look, they're free to change it – but she still has to be recognisably Tinkerbellish: temperamental, jealous of Wendy and sometimes a downright menace. But the film doesn't have the bottle to make an ethnicity-changed Tink a flawed character, so she ends up bland, friendly with Wendy and not noticeably in love with Peter. As for Tiger Lily, I could buy her having big-sisterly feelings for Peter, but otherwise, she's not allowed to have a personality either: she's just wise and, of course, good at fighting.
But, yeah, Jude Law's Hook was good.
Not that the pirate side of things was flawlessly handled either. The pirates of Neverland aren't meant to resemble any real pirates that ever lived: they're supposed to be the kind of pirates children imagine when they're playing. Having a gritty-looking, greasy-haired Hook instead of the usual glamorous swashbuckler is misunderstanding the source material. For all that, Law plays Hook with an inner melancholy disguised by bravado I think Barrie would have approved of. And I like the sea shanties.
I have some sympathy for the film's attempts to focus on the part of the story I happen to find most fascinating as well: the relationship between Peter Pan and Hook. Here as in so many other versions of the tale, they started out as friends before the friendship went sour. They are also more dependent on each other than they like to admit. When the film revolves around this relationship, I actually found it interesting with even a couple of touching moments.
The problem is that the film is called Peter Pan & Wendy, not Peter Pan & Hook or simply Hook (Spielberg beat Disney to that one). It's supposed to be an adaptation of the classic story, not a left-field take on it. The main plot, though, is told in a perfunctory manner. I can relate to finding Hook's character more intriguing than Peter Pan's, but if that's the way you feel, then maybe you shouldn't do a film based on Barrie's book and play, but rather a prequel or retelling. In the original Peter Pan and Wendy, whatever one may think of Peter Pan, he's very much the hero of his own life.
