13-year-old Wendy Darling, Rachel Hurd-Wood, is on the cusp of womanhood, but she\'s a romantic who isn\'t ready to grow up just yet. When Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, played by Jeremy Sumpter, and the fairy Tinkerbell, Ludivine Sagnier, come to the bedroom Wendy shares with her brothers one night, the Darling children agree to fly away to Neverland with him, where they encounter various adventures with mermaids, Indians and pirates led by Peter\'s arch enemy, Captain Hook, Jason Isaacs, who lives in fear from the giant crocodile that already ate his hand and now wants the rest of him. J.M. Barrie\'s Peter Pan, first produced on the London stage in 1904, has posed significant challenges to filmmakers over the years, not least the technical challenge of making the children fly convincingly. These days, that poses no real problem for filmmakers of course and in most ways this is the best film version of the play since Herbert Brenon\'s silent version (you can\'t really take Spielberg\'s Hook very seriously). All the same, this is an uneven affair; the made-in-Queensland production is lavish and sometimes stylish, especially in the London scenes that bookend the story; but Neverland is a garish, rather unattractive fantasy land, and too much of the film seems cluttered and chaotic. Rachel Hurd-Wood is perfectly cast as Wendy, but Jeremy Sumpter\'s Peter has an American accent which stands out among all the English accents of the rest of the cast. Jason Isaacs is better as the formidable Hook than he is as Mr. Darling, and it\'s difficult to see Ludivine Sagnier\'s Tinkerbell without recalling her sexy role in Swimming Pool. This Peter Pan has a great deal of merit, but it\'s not quite the modern classic children\'s fantasy it wants to be.
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