It takes a movie such as Pan to make you realise that Oz the Great and Powerful wasn’t all that bad. Like that 2013 film, Pan is an origin-story prequel to a children’s classic that nobody asked for, but it doesn’t even lead to the point we all recognise. Through most of Pan, young Peter (Levi Miller) is brothers-in-adventure with the older James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and remains so to the end of the movie. Hook never turns evil, nor does he lose his hand, and the film concludes with the greatest fright of all: maybe another Peter Pan movie is in the pipeline, to fill in the rest of the backstory before we get to the JM Barrie original.

Joe Wright defends casting of Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in Pan Read more

The backstory is the greatest foe in director Joe Wright’s uneven film. Ten minutes before the ending, our young orphan protagonist, having been whisked away from 1940s London by a flying pirate ship, is still having secrets explained to him via inelegant exposition checkpoints. There are discovered letters, a Memory Tree, and a lagoon enchanted by mermaids endowed with the power of studio script notes.

This total lack of forward momentum is made worse by a bland cast of characters and uninspired action. It turns out that this special boy with a mysterious pan-flute necklace is a “chosen one”, whose father was an all-powerful fairy and whose mother, a native from Neverland (named Mary, why go for subtlety?), left him in our world until he was old enough to fight for peace at home. Miller is fine enough as the courageous British tyke, but Hedlund, something of a poor man’s Channing Tatum to begin with, voices the future Captain Hook as John Wayne by way of Pa Kettle. (And I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny.) They meet when Peter is snatched with other orphans and sent to work in “pixim” mines, mining fairy dust for evil pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The film team review Pan

Jackman is just following the routine by now, chomping up scenery as a bad guy in an altogether dreadful film. But it’s not nearly enough. He’s no Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending. His quarry of (mostly) child labour greets newcomers with a rousing chorus of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and leads them to punishment with the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop. You can practically see an impassioned director selling the studio: “Audiences won’t know what to think!!!” Indeed.

This anachronistic dice roll would work if the rest of the picture’s creativity measured up. What is striking is how bland everything is. Rooney Mara gets in on the faux-inspirational act as the “native” Tiger Lily. It’s the type of thankless role Natalie Portman doesn’t do any more, and hopefully Mara won’t either, now that she’s got Carol under her belt. The only interesting thing about Tiger Lily is her ceremonial headdress, which looks like it was fashioned after Gossamer from Looney Tunes. Adeel Akhtar’s cockney version of Hook’s sycophantic chum Smee doesn’t get any clever lines, but he is at least moderately charming.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Levi Miller as the young Peter in Pan Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros

Eventually we get a big finish, in which Peter leads the Fairies – trod-upon, wordless pins of light – into a final, exhausting battle with Blackbeard and his flying ship. But getting there is a chore. There are a handful of in-jokes (Hook hates crocodiles! Blackbeard just said “Think a happy thought”!) that ought to please no one, and a mute, computer-enhanced Cara Delevingne swims up from the uncanny valley as a mermaid to give Hedlund’s Hook a “Gosh, ain’t she a beaut” moment. No, the pirates singing Nirvana are not the worst thing in this movie.

It could be that endlessly staring at computer monitors has ruined my eyesight (or that auditorium six of the Regal Kaufman Astoria has a wonky projector bulb), but I was shocked at how dark Pan was. So much of the movie is set in London at night, inside caves or in Blackbeard’s brooding chambers. Only one sequence, a fighting set-piece with the natives, is brightly lit, and its production design is striking.

Bored parents continually checked their smartphones from about 15 minutes into the film, and by the end, restless children were running around the theatre. Normally I’d tsk at such unruly behaviour, but this time, who could blame them?