THE PROBLEM WITH PETER PAN A review of the bad movie WENDY

 

THE PROBLEM WITH PETER PAN

A review of the bad movie WENDY

 

Gosh. I stumbled into HBO’s movie showing of WENDY. Aka TRAILER TRASH PAN and WENDY. Aka, the cheap Peter Pan in the Real World. I gave up after about 20 minutes. I’d like to say it had good use of its locations, which was all it had, outdoor locations. It was a cheap movie. It might have been something if they had the theme right. They didn’t. It was flat, boring, and without ANY of the magic of PETER PAN.

 

It seems almost no one can get PETER PAN right. Okay, JM Barrie did. Did you know the original play as written did not have Captain Hook. Peter was the villain, a dark shadowy figure stealing children and/or girls. That said, the balance of his innocence, darkness, light, magic, energy, and perseverance in not growing up and having fun as well as some innate sadness within was really only captured by three entities. That would be the original novel (and perhaps PETER IN KENSINGTON GARDENS, the first story of Pan…as a baby!). The novel is dark and has moments of pure horror as well as magic and reality. It’s wonderful and there’s a coda to it and the play about Peter returning for Wendy and setting up house in the park, followed by a survived Hook and his aide Smee.

 

The second would be the 1990s series FOX’S PETER PAN AND THE PIRATES (with Hook voice by Tim Curry, who won awards for that excellent portrayal). For EVERY one of its 65 well drawn episodes, well scored and acted, the show followed the book closely. Peter acts…like Peter and NOT like some sanitized Disney nonsense. Sure, he’s fully clothed but this is a kid cartoon. Only…the episodes sometimes take one or two mentions in the novel and makes full stories out of them, such as Peter’s perchance to changing sides in the middle of a battle and quite a few other asides in the book. One story has Hook so get under Peter’s skin that Peter slowly starts to age in the two parter called AGES OF PAN. Another has Peter go so far into the future (he and Tink see planes!) that he forgets Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys but brings Jane—Wendy’s daughter-- back in another story. A fabulous series that I suspect Disney has kept somehow, secretly, from the public ever since. Disney sometimes has the habit of acting like a huge bully, an evil corporate baddies. Once, I contacted the company that made Ocean Girl, a great four season series from Australia. They were hesitant to tell me why Disney Channel just dropped the show, never aired its fourth season, and refused to even show repeats. Disney wanted to own Ocean Girl outright. When the company refused, they dropped the show and threatened them.

 

Similarly, Disney had the show MOWGLI: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF THE JUNGLE BOOK shifted around somehow and only six to four episodes aired in some areas of the US, while there were over 26 episodes. You can find them on You Tube and maybe with some dealers but now that Ioffer.com is gone, it’s tougher. You Tube is your best bet. A life action version of THE JUNGLE BOOK and a continuation of it, it was thrilling and wonderfully cast.

 

I’m also sure Disney tried to stop one of the…no, the only great PETER PAN live action there was in December of 2003. Sorry, even if he’s not British, Jeremy Sumpter made the best Peter Pan and stopped the stupid tradition of having Pan played by a…female. Not only that Captain Hook was the great Jason Issacs of HARRY POTTER fame. With a big budget, brilliant special effects, a likeable…no, loveable cast throughout and the best actor to play Peter Pan, it’s no wonder that NO production can compete with this. Others have tried after this movie and failed miserably. NEVERLAND, the mini series came close but failed. PAN was a disaster. And years ago, before PETER PAN 2003, the movie HOOK completely had the entire premise totally wrong and was a mess of a movie despite Dante Basco (of AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER animated series, RAVEN-one episode) and a stellar, failed cast. Even ONCE UPON A TIME had Peter totally wrong, a man who never …well, became young…or something. Throughout the show’s fourth season, Peter was cast as a terrible villain (played by a very good actor), evil, and menacing to a sympathetic, good looking and charismatic Hook. How wrong can a TV show get Peter Pan and Hook? Very. Good casting but totally horrible scripts and situations and the worst outcome for ANY (other than maybe HOOK) Peter Pan adaption or presentation. God.

 

Other productions such as NEVERLAND with Wil Wheaton as  a Peter in a real world amusement park or NEVER NEVER LAND with Peter as a vampire or the web series WENDY with Peter as a girl’s dream being almost work. In EAST OF KENSINGTON, Jack Griffo (of THE THUNDERMANS) is Pan in a grown up Michael’s lair. They don’t quite make it. Even worse is COME AWAY and a BBC remake as well as PETER GOES WRONG. All of these went wrong. And compared to the PETER PAN of 2003, all of them are really PsOS.

 

THE LOST, a comic book series, really DID work. It cast Peter as the leader of a vampire sect of vampire lost boys. The art and story combined to really commit to a good story.

 

Other comics failed. There’s some French comic where Peter is a rapist, sentence to die or something. He raped Wendy or something? There’s another where two African American boys are taken to NEVERLAND in RETURN TO NEVER LAND (this almost works well but…it’s lackluster). PETER PANZERFEST or something has Peter fighting Nazis in WW2 but then...it made him bad, fighting Nazies made him a monster. Right? Wrong. And many kept getting and keep getting Peter wrong. And on and on.

And on and on.

 

If you do a search for Peter Pan and Wendy books or even Hook books on Amazon, you’ll find at least ten dozen books and series, almost none of them getting the premise right. In one Peter is Wendy, a trans character (the book goes for some 999 dollars) but sounds awful. What a bad idea. In others, Peter is 18. In others Peter is a rival against Hook for Wendy’s romance and Hook wins out and…ewl.

 

All of which brings me to WENDY. A girl dreams of leaving her crappy, poverty ridden life after her brother (I think) or great uncle or something vanishes on a train. There’s a poor boy who jumps train cars that intrigues her. She runs away, followed by her two brothers. The whole thing is sad and loses ALL the magic. I can’t even say that even if not compared to PETER PAN (2003), this is a good movie version of Peter Pan. I can’t say that they didn’t try as the cast and the writing is strong but it’s just all wrong, lacking any real magic to it at all. PETER PAN needs that balance I wrote of at the start of this review and this movie has NONE  of it. Instead, it’s just a bunch of losers pretending in the real world. One of Wendy’s brothers starts getting older and seems to morph into an old man or something. None of it is engaging or charming or even meaningful. It’s all just morbid and boring. Stay clear.