Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I remember having the full action figure line and the Happy Meal toys on this one.
Was I the only one?
Did I Like It: With Spielberg making the rounds plugging Disclosure Day (2026), I’ve got to again listen to him occasionally dump on his own work here. He says he lacked much confidence in the second act of the film, and that feels right. The first half hour of the film may not make a whole lot of sense*, but the kidnapping of Pan’s (Williams, just maybe the role he was born to play; pity the script wasn’t a hair tighter) kids was sufficiently terrifying to stick in my head 35 years later.
That terror deflates like a punctured balloon by the time anyone gets to Neverland (which feels like it happens about an hour into things, which is its own problem) Hook is less some demented creature that will definitely take me away in the middle of the night, and just some clown dominated by decades—even centuries—of anxieties, resentments, and neurosis. Even if Spielberg never intended the message, or even if he couldn’t quite articulate it to his satisfaction, there is a a profound child-like fantasy at play here, and one that might just turn out to be true:
It’s the scariest of adults who are unavoidably the most pathetic creatures you’re bound to find out there in the world.
*If Hook (Hoffman, so wildly unrecognizable in the role that I was probably in my twenties before I realized the Captain and Rain Man are the same guy) could always just pop up in Wendy’s (Maggie Smith) bedroom, doesn’t that mean that the Neverlands Pirates could pretty much go anywhere they want to and make Pan’s life a perpetualy living hell?