And if he doesn't remember this, at least one person does: Captain Hook the pirate, who has bided his time all these decades, and has taken this opportunity to kidnap Jack and Maggie as part of his life-consuming desire to take revenge on Peter for be-handing him once upon a time. And Peter, though he doesn't remember it, is the Peter: the boy from Neverland who refused to grow up, until he finally did. Wendy, by the way, is the Wendy: the one who inspired J.M Barrie to write the play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up in 1904 (in fact, Barrie wrote the play for the five children of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, all of them boys). This particular Christmas season, Peter has committed himself to heading back to London, where he grew up an orphan in the children's home run by Moira's grandmother Wendy (Maggie Smith) this year, she's being fêted as the dedicatee of a new wing at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and even a soulless workaholic like Peter has enough humanity left in his heart to know that he can't ignore a major event in life of such an important woman in his and Moira's life. Less, if you're a particular whiz with plants. No, Hook is not about Hook so much, but about Peter Banning (Robin Williams), a California lawyer who, by virtue of having that profession in a turn-of-the-'90s family film, is a happily self-regarding asshole who treats his wife Moira (Caroline Goodall) and children Jack (Charlie Korsmo) and Maggie (Amber Scott) with only somewhat more affection and attention than you or I might regard a particularly beloved potted plant. ![]() That's with Hoffman receiving first billing, even. And given that the movie has sense enough to realise that Captain James Hook (Dustin Hoffman) is its strongest element, it's frustrating as hell that Hook spends so little time onscreen. Like, the first outright good scene in the movie doesn't happen for a half of an hour (and at 142 minutes for a lighthearted kiddie fantasy, this is one of the all-time champion "longer than it had any chance of ever justifying" movies). It's more that my fond memories grossly miscalculated what percentage of the film was made up of the bad parts. So the disclosure isn't "I'm letting nostalgia cloud my judgment", but "I am really damn sad that I super don't love this movie like I did when I last saw it 20 something years ago".Īnyway, even as a child, I knew which parts of the film worked and which parts didn't. ![]() It's a broken film with substantially too many strong individual elements to discard it (and it is one of the most essential Spielberg-as-Auteur films, if that's your jam), but those strong elements do feel awfully damn lonely. I say this in the spirit of necessary full disclosure, though I don't think I'm giving Hook points it doesn't deserve. Having been born in 1981, I am from a very precise generational cohort that is now and forever unable to separate my childhood feelings towards the 1991 Steven Spielberg fantasy epic Hook from actual considerations of its quality. A review requested by Caleb Wimble, with thanks for supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
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