CREDIT: WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. (2015)
Pan, directed by Joe Wright, is a complete let down, something that is hard to believe with the countless notable actors. Viewers have to endure over-acting and numerous unanswered questions; the only strong part of this movie is the scenery.

Telling the story of how Peter Pan, an orphan boy living in London during WWII, came to live in Neverland, Pan adds very little to the story we all know. Beginning with a narration that tells the audience this is something new and different, the movie shuffles along from disappointment to disappointment, never once fulfilling its promise.

The first of this movie’s many, many problems is the acting. It’s a bit depressing when the best actor in a cast that includes Hugh Jackman is the kid playing 12-year-old Peter, Levi Miller. Every other character is overacted to the point of being obscene. The most surprising part of any of the performances is the fact that Jackman (in his role as Blackbeard) never actually twirls his mustache while letting out a villainous laugh.

The worst offender by far is the discount Brendan Fraser known as Hook, mangled by the thoroughly uninspiring Garrett Hedlund. Instead of the clever menace of Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal from the 1991 classic Hook, or even the sexy suave pirate seen in Once Upon a Time, we get a whiny, hopeless romantic who’s only there as a convenient plot device.

Pan is a movie that needs plot devices as the script feels like they took the worst parts of a collection of children’s action movies and threw them together. Very little makes sense, and it’s impossible to sympathize with any of the characters, all of whom only have the vaguest resemblance of actual human beings.

Instead of being a wild romp, the movie comes across as a sad tale of a man addicted to crystal meth, desperately trying to get his fix while recovering from the loss of his adulterous wife. The analogy isn’t even subtle, as the movie changes Blackbeard’s appearance to mimic withdrawal symptoms. There is even a point where he literally has small creatures crawling on his skin in a pathetic analogy to one of the common side effects of the drug.

There are also a million questions that are never answered. How old is Blackbeard? How does he know so many songs from the ’80s? Why does he only weirdly age that one time? Wouldn’t killing all the fairies limit his supply of drugs? Who decided to make Tinkerbell blue? Why is Peter the only one who can fly? Why is there an awkward love story shoved into this kids movie? How are people teleporting across the screen like that? The questions are as numerous as the editing is poor.

As terrible as Pan is, it does have one positive feature: the world of Neverland is absolutely gorgeous. Once in Neverland, everything is bright and colourful and has abstract features reminiscent of the artwork of Salvador Dali. There are moments of storytelling accompanied by stunning animation, as wood and water morph to fit the spoken words. Sadly, this quality is wildly inconsistent, especially when animating the humans.

While visually beautiful, this is a movie that lets the audience down at every moment. With extreme overacting, hundreds of plot holes and some of the worst editing ever seen, Pan is a huge disappointment.