“Hook” is not without generous helpings of fairy dust itself. The movie gets off to a magical start, as Peter, now Peter Banning, a workaholic corporate “pirate” who neglects his wife (Caroline Goodall) and two children (Charlie Korsmo and Amber Scott) travels to London to pay tribute to “Granny” Wendy (a luminous Maggie Smith), who is crestfallen to discover that the compulsive Peter has totally forgotten that he once was Pan. This London preamble-where the kids are kidnapped by Captain Hook, and Peter is summoned to Neverland to rescue them-exudes a rich, burnished Spielbergian glow. We have been deliciously primed for the Neverland experience.
Then an unfortunate thing happens to “Hook”-Neverland itself. Nothing that transpires there is nearly as magical as the “real” world of London. And an awful lot happens. At 135 minutes, “Hook” is a dangerously overextended children’s fantasy, so busy explaining the revised rules of the Peter Pan legend that the plot often seems to be chasing its own tail. By the time this overstuffed epic comes to its conclusion, you feel like you’ve been watching the dance of an 800-pound elf.
In Neverland, where Peter’s business savvy is useless, he must relearn the 3 Fs–fun, fencing and flying-i.e., he gets in touch with his inner child. Hook, dismayed at the unworthiness of his old foe, gives him three days to get into fighting shape-and off Peter goes to the Lost Boys boot camp to regain his sense of play. Spielberg’s famous touch with children mysteriously fails him with these skateboarding, hoop-shooting Lost Boys, a multiethnic Benetton ad come to awkward, charmless life. The much-hyped Neverland sets are a letdown: over-lit, they have the cheesy artifice of a rundown amusement park. In the cluttered Neverland sequences, Spielberg is like a child who’s been given too many toys to play with-he’s juggling so many whimsical notions (and expensive props) he loses sight of the tale’s simple core. “Hook’s” message of homespun family values hardly needs the kind of hard sell it gets: you would think a movie about the power of imagination would leave more room for our own. Julia Roberts’s strenuously spritely Tinkerbell typifies the problem: she’s less a fairy muse than a thimble-size Georgia Tech cheerleader.
Luckily, Robin Williams keeps his eye on the ball throughout “Hook’s” ups and downs: he gives us just enough hint of the lost waif in Peter Banning to redeem this ’90s cliche of the soulless corporate grind, and his transition to Pan is built with lovely comic steps. Hoffman’s Hook is a drolly sinister creation with an amusing English accent and a great set of bad teeth (it’s a nice idea that his ultimate revenge is to steal the affections of Peter’s son). But he never becomes the dominating figure the title promises. Korsmo shines as Peter’s neglected, sullen boy; the daughter, however, gets quickly relegated to the sidelines. A good half hour too long, and badly in need of some scares, “Hook” is a huge party cake of a movie, with too much frosting. After the first delicious bite, sugar shock sets in.
