When you have filmography as impressive as Steven Spielberg does, you can allow yourself to have couple of major failures in it and still have your excellent reputation intact. You can survive even such fiascos that are as hated by your fans as your biggest hits are loved. In case of Spielberg this happened with his 1991 fantasy adventure Hook.
The film is based on the Peter Pan stories by British author J. M. Barrie. The protagonist, played by Robin Williams, is Peter Banning, San Francisco corporate lawyer whose dedication to the work made him neglect his wife Moira (played by Catherine Goodall) and two children – son Jack (played by Charlie Korsmo) and daughter Maggie (played by Amber Scott). He nevertheless catches time to bring his family to London where he is to attend ceremony honouring Moira’s grandmother Wendy Darling (played by Maggie Smith) and her charitable work with children. During the stay in London his children mysteriously disappear and Grandma Wendy, much to his surprise, tells him that he is actually Peter Pan and the children were abducted by his pirate arch-enemy Captain Hook (played by Dustin Hoffman). Peter doesn’t believe her, but one night he gets visited by a little fairy named Tinker Bell (played by Julia Roberts) and taken to Neverland, magical place where he would have to reconnect with Lost Boys, his old friends who, unlike him, never grew up. When he accepts Hook’s challenge to fight for his children, he is faced with serious problems, because he forgot everything about his past life in Neverland, including ability to fly.
Spielberg tried to make his own Peter Pan story for many years, and this idea, at least on paper, made perfect sense. Spielberg has already established himself as master of Hollywood’s family-friendly entertainment and his best films contained adventure and sense of wonder which is associated with childhood. Having great and versatile comedian like Robin Williams in Peter Pan’s role was also good idea, because few Hollywood actors at the time could play adult person trying to rediscover his inner child so effectively. Despite promising concept and talents behinds and in front of camera, Hook turned into failure. While Spielberg’s name on poster and effective advertising campaign brought great success at the box office, critics, until that time usually favourable to Spielberg, turned quite negative and the subsequent years showed that Hook never managed to build cult or develop nostalgic feelings among its first-time audiences like Spielberg’s best hits from 1970s or 1980s.
The reason for that can be traced to complicated script by Jim V. Hart and Malia Scotch Marmo, based on the simple idea of making Peter Pan grow up. Spielberg probably found a little bit of himself in Peter Banning’s character – a Hollywood’s boy wonder who had a blast producing exciting adventure films only to develop into middle-aged corporate overlord of American cinema who had or was in process of losing his childhood-like sense of wonder. Script, however, tried to explore this theme through serious retconning of Barrie’s original material. Hook, which resurrects Captain Hook and gives new and complicated family backstory to Pete Pan, at times looks less like a sequel and more like a weird fan fiction. Yet, most of those problems could have been solved if Spielberg had the same creative magic at his disposal as before.
This didn’t happen. Spielberg provides adequate but mostly uninspired direction that too often relies too much on outrageous art direction and huge studio set that looks underwhelming despite 70 million US$ of budget. Spielberg loses a sense of pace – the audience would have to wait almost an hour before being introduced to the title character of Hook, and the result is typically bloated Hollywood blockbuster with running time of almost two and half hours, which would be quite demanding for the youngest audience Hook was partially intended for. Spielberg also allows some details in character’s language that could be interpreted as not exactly family-friendly. John Williams, Spielberg’s old associate responsible for many of his past triumphs, delivers adequate but strangely forgettable score.
Another issue of the film is in the cast. While Robin Williams (who would later become Spielberg’s life long friend on the set) is very good, just as Dustin Hoffman who has great fun despite having face buried under heavy makeup, Hook is almost destroyed by terrible miscasting of Tinker Bell. She, brought to the project more because of its star status than actual talent, is not convincing as fairy, especially with American accent that stands out too much with the rest of cast. To make things worse, she and Spielberg weren’t getting along at the set, which was often attributed to Roberts’ poor emotional state over her messy private life. Spielberg, by his own admission, also had trouble handling large number of child actors on the set, although some, like those playing Peter’s children and Dante Basco, who plays Peter’s Lost Boy rival Rufio, did good job. Veterans like Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, who was wonderful in the role of Hook’s boatswain Smee, improved general impression, but not as much as needed for Hook not to be considered as failure. Many year later Spielberg himself agreed with such verdict, proving that truly great film makers are those willing to admit they can be wrong.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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