[8.7/10] We live in the age of the late sequel. Any property with the slightest bit of name recognition has to be revivified and dredged back up to please the masses once more. Reboots and remakes are not enough anymore. We want continuations of our childhood heroes and long-loved tales, updated for our modern sensibilities and grow-up attitudes.
The catch is that despite the glut of these projects, few have been especially good at satisfying these needs or justifying the resurrections. Maybe they should look all the way back to the veritable dark ages of 1991, when Steven Spielberg and his team added another act to J.M. Barrie’s famed 1904 play and the slew of adaptations it spawned. Perhaps it’s the distance in time, or performers involved, or just Spielberg at the height of his powers. Whatever the reason, Hook succeeds as an extension of the Barrie original in a way so few latter day updates do.
That comes, in large part, because it has something to say. Peter Pan is famously about not wanting to grow up and the threshold between childhood and adulthood that so many are both so eager and so reluctant to cross. Hook doesn't just rehash that idea with new window-dressing; it turns it on its head.
Spielberg’s take on the Neverland mythos is, like so many family films in the nineties, about a stuffy, business-focused parent learning that their loved ones are more important than their work. But it’s not just about Peter rediscovering his zest for life and the mischievous spark of youth; it’s about him needing to rediscover it because he’s a dad.
More than anything, Hook is about the joys and satisfaction of parenthood, rendered all the more precious and sacred to those parents who were once orphans. While the 1904 original is about children running away from their mother and father to revel in their youth, the 1991 sequel is about a father returning to Neverland letting that same spirit of youth reconnect him to his children.
That tack gives the film ballast, adding an emotional undercurrent to the fantasy land adventure of pirates and lost boys and flying knaves tossing insults and paint bombs at one another. For all its family-friendly adventurism, Hook isn’t afraid to lay into the waterworks, in moments when a crowd full of orphans stands up to honor the woman who loved them, or Peter realizes that his happy thought is becoming a father. This is no mere soulless redo; it’s a movie wrought from the children who grew up loving the story of The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up and looked upon it with different eyes when they were Mr. and Mrs. Darling than when they were Wendy, John, and Michael.
It’s also just damn fun. You can skate by for more than two breezy, colorful hours without ever having to dig deeply into the film’s themes and instead just enjoying the tale of a timid, beamer-driving lawyer remembering that he’s Peter frickin’ Pan. One of the best things about Hook is that it’s accessible at several different levels: as a simple story of good versus evil, as a deeper story of self-discovery and being a good parent, or even as a meditation on orphanhood and mortality. For all that’s going under the hood (or in the ship’s hold, given the circumstances), the movie rarely, if ever, forgets to just be fun as hell.
Much of that comes from the performers. There has never been a better casting choice to play a spirited young boy in a grown man’s body than Robin Williams. He sells the irony of Peter Pan having become a modern day pirate, one scared of heights and flying, worried about every eventuality rather than apt to throw caution for the wind. But he also sells that nebbish’s re-transformation into a flying, fighting, crowing sprite who can lob barbs of the verbal and literal variety like nobody’s business. Hook doesn't work without Williams as its anchor, plying his usual motor-mouthed quips, but also communicating the heart and deeper ideas of the picture, at the same time he’s called upon to play a Neverland neophyte.
But he meets his equal and opposite in Dustin Hoffman’s take on James Hook, Captain. This is Hoffman at his scene-chewing best. He lays into the role with relish, bringing a theatrical bent to the foppish old brute, whose devotion to good or poor form, his desire for vengeance and the catharsis of war with a worthy adversary, and his propagandizing plots makes him a brilliant realization of the classic character.
That’s before you get to Bob Hoskins finding his jittery glory as Smee. And Maggie Smith delivering all the wistful gravitas she is capable of. And Charlie Korsmo displaying a surprisingly layered performance as Peter’s disgruntled son. And all of the whimsical lost boys and rowdy pirates and other supporting characters who wow in parts big and small. Sure, Julia Roberts is off in this despite some big scenes, but the casting directors went all out in this one, populating both Neverland and London with fantastic faces.
The same goes for the production designers. There’s a certain stage-y, unreal quality to Neverland that helps give it the larger than life sense of wonder it needs to carry. The sets are colorful, with several up and down levels and inviting cul de sacs that give it scope and scale despite fairly enclosed environs. So much of the movie depends on Neverland feeling right, and that’s never a problem thanks to the playhouse feel of the Lost Boys’ colony, Captain Hook’s lagoon, and even the storied bedroom that’s the gateway to it all.
Of course, Spielberg’s camera also adds to the spirit of the film. There is, appropriately for a Peter Pan, a great use of shadows, hinting at the differences between who Peter Banning was and who he used to be. In the same vein, Spielberg deploys any number of match cuts, most notably placing Williams in the same fists-on-hips preen to signify connection and return to the youthful posture. And he fills the frame with reflections, whether it’s Hook gazing into his own image, or Jack seeing his face on the clocks he smashes, or Peter finding his old self in the water after a bump on the noggin. The cinematography, iconography, and aesthetic of the film is to die for.
Or to live for. That is, secretly, what Hook centers itself around. At one point in the movie, during a stretch that is, frankly, somewhat overexplain-y, Peter admits that he never wanted to grow up because he never wanted to die. Hook himself seems to have his own sense of fatalism, welcoming death as “the ultimate adventure” and pretending to want it himself only to change the game at the last minute. With that, the movie hints at Neverland as its own sort of living death, a place of stasis where life stagnates. Peter Pan doesn't want that anymore, not because he’s tired of games or adventures or the swashbuckling action that the film does to such thrilling effect. But because he wants to see his children grow up, to grow old and have a full life, as a man, a husband, and a father.
That’s the secret sauce that so many modern updates are missing. Hook does more than just play the old favorites for a new generation. It reflects on them, remixes them, reconsiders them in light of the central themes of the original and how much has changed, in the world and in us, since then. It is a touch treacly and indulgent in places, but like its hero, its heart is in the right place. At a time when so many of our childhood favorites have been brought back to life in one form or another, more works would do well to borrow from this 1991 classic, and know when to hold onto the joys of youth, but also when to grow up.
