The other key characters appear: Hook, played by Dustin Hoffman as if he were doing an imitation instead of a performance, and Tinker Bell, played by Julia Roberts more as a duty than a pleasure. The whole thing looks like what it is, a movie set, right down to the unconvincing backdrops, and for some reason there’s a shift to red and brown in the color spectrum, so Neverland (which in my imagination, at least, is on a lush green island) looks as if it’s in the midst of a drought. The long, long, long Neverland sequences take place in a cluttered rag-and-bone shop of art direction there are too many characters, too many props, too many signs, too many costumes, bad traffic direction, and no sense of place or space. Then Robin Williams takes his wife and children back to London to visit Granny Wendy, who adopted him as an orphan, and as the kids sleep in the very same bedroom where the original story began, we get the Spielberg visual trademark of the blinding light on the other side of the rattling window: The promise of magic, just outside.Īfter the children disappear and Peter finds Hook’s kidnap note and is told by Granny Wendy who he really is and why he must follow, I was poised for a breathtaking first view of Neverland, but what I got was a dreary disappointment. Spielberg sets the scene in modern-day America, where the executive lifestyle leaves no time for fathers to spend with children. ![]() No effort is made to involve Peter’s magic in the changed world he now inhabits, and little thought has been given to Captain Hook’s extraordinary persistence in wanting to revisit the events of the past. ![]() The sad thing about the screenplay for "Hook" is that it’s so correctly titled: This whole construction is really nothing more than a hook on which to hang a new version of the Peter Pan story.
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