Review of Pan (2015) by Kaylan W — 17 Nov 2015

Good gravy, where do I even start with this one?

Pan is an utter disaster of a film, a garish mishmash of inconsistent visual style, embarrassingly over-the-top performances and hyperactive pacing that was jumbled in the editing room and coated wall-to-wall with cartoony CGI excess. All that together in and of itself would be enough excuse to label Pan as a middling-to-bad film, but what truly pushes it into the territory of shockingly awful is its script, credited to Jason Fuchs. That last name seems appropriate, given how seemingly few Fuchs were given when slapping together this coked-up clusterFuch excuse for an origin story to an iconic and beloved literary character. The film spends much of its running time jarringly shifting its plans in attempt after attempt to settle on an identity, whether it be a dark reboot, goofy adventure tale, or jukebox musical (I swear, they start abruptly singing awful covers of Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" and the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop", only to drop any further conceit of being a musical about halfway through the movie). Eventually it just settles on being yet another boring, tired and cliche "chosen one"/prophecy narrative where the characters fight over a magical macguffin (fairy dust, which is now a minable kind of magic rocks known as "pixium"- ugh...) and purports being a deep story about Pan and Captain Hook starting out as friends, an admittedly interesting idea that's poorly developed and goes nowhere. It all ends up unfolding with zero tension, stakes and character investment, content to substitute all those things with predictable plot beats and groan-worthy shoehorned references to familiar Peter Pan lore.

I can't say I had the highest hopes going into this film, but I never expected it to be THIS. Pan is a godawful trainwreck, a textbook example of big budget studio spending gone horribly wrong and an embarrassing black mark on the resumes of everyone involved. I'm not sure any movie this year could possibly be worse than Fox's new Fantastic Four, but Pan comes awfully close.