Rufio! Rufio! Ru-Fi-OOOOOOOOOOOOOh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Peter Pan has become Peter Banning (Robin Williams), a 40-year-old mergers and acquisitions lawyer with a permanent scowl on his face and a cellular phone in his belt. Banning has lost any memory of being Peter Pan, and he is also in danger of losing his wife Moira (Caroline Goodall) and two children, Jack (Charlie Korsmo) and Maggie (Amber Scott). Peter and his family travel to London to visit Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith) who recalls Peter’s lost youth and asks him, “Peter, dear, don’t you know who you are?” With Peter’s children asleep in the same bedroom where the original Peter Pan story began, there is a blinding flash. Peter comes into the room to discover a note from Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), informing Peter that he has kidnapped his children. Granny Wendy now tells him who he really is and encourages him to re-discover his happy thoughts, transform himself into the Peter Pan of the past, and go rescue his children. With the encouragement of Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts), Peter recalls the birth of his son and once again takes wing. Then it’s off to Never Land to rescue his kids. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
Man, I remember watching this movie when I was six and being absolutely entranced by a world where kids can be part of the lost boys and kill pirates and never grow old and have imaginary dinners. Also, who didn’t want to be Rufio when they grew up. He was a badass, kind of like the kid in high school who wore a leather jacket and picked on the jocks of the school while ditching class to work on their Firebird in the school parking lot. I might have dated myself with a Firebird reference, but still that was the lasting image of the movie to me. Yeah Peter Pan is the penultimate figure of being a kid and having adventures, but Rufio did have a mohawk thing going and was king kid of the Lost Boys. Strangely enough, they didn’t kill vampires.
Ok, so the tangent aside, Hook is not a good movie. Having grown up and refining my taste for movies, Spielberg loves to slather on the syrupy melodrama of childhood innocence being lost with doe-eyed expressions and meticulous musical score. The movie is all over the place with just cluttered exposition that doesn’t go anywhere, weird dance numbers for some reason, cheesy acting, and just a mess of a film. You know what though, I still love it for its whimsy and the lost boys. I would have preferred the movie to be just about the Lost Boys and their pirate killing, cause they were boasting about that in the movie. A kids film that voiced the general love of killing pirates, woah!
This is honestly one of a few movies of Robin Williams career that I truly enjoy. Yeah it’s weird to see him in tights and shit, but the fact that you watch him become Pan once again and generally regress back into a child mentality is entertaining. Dustin Hoffman plays a campy Hook, but damn if it isn’t entertaining. Overlooking the Spielberg traits of filmmaking is a bit hard to ignore, but I can appreciate the work that went into this high production value film.
Ru-Fi-OOOOOOOOOOOOOh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
