Sir James Barrie conceived of the Never Land as a truly wondrous place where British children of the Edwardian era could remain children, where irresponsibility and spontaneity could be preserved and not perish in the service of king and country or business and family, and where the only empire to be fought for was a “nicely crammed” island with lagoons and tree houses and pirates and Indians. But in Hook, Steven Spielberg's sequel to Peter Pan, the children are Americanized and are precociously hip as most American kids are. One can picture these Lost Boys back in the States: skateboarding, plugging away at video games, cruising shopping malls. But there are no video games in the Never Land, no shopping malls, and though there are a few skateboards, it's not as much fun riding one through forests as it is to hurtle through urban crowds. So, since these American kids on Spielberg's island aren't escaping Latin conjugations and canings in strict public schools but are rather being deprived of MTV, Walkman headphones, and pizza pie, they seem as underprivileged as children stuck in a summer camp long after the summer has ended. They are Lost Boys, indeed, dependent upon each other for entertainment and waiting for Peter Pan to return.

For it is the conceit of this film that Peter Pan, during one of his periodic visits to the aging Wendy, finally fell in love with Wendy's granddaughter, forsook his eternal youth, married, bred, and became a corporate raiding lawyer. Only after Captain Hook kidnaps his two children does this middle-aged Pan revert to his swashbuckling self and, even then, it's primarily to win back the admiration of his disaffected son and prove that he's not a workaholic zombie. (It seems Dad Pan has been missing too many Little League games.)

The scenes that set up this premise in the first twenty minutes are the best in the movie. They fill us with the happiness children feel on Christmas Eve: all joy is impending, all expectation delicious. Spielberg teases us with our memories of the book, the plays, and the movies. The adult Pan is afraid of flying, even on airplanes. The ninety-year-old Wendy, upon learning of her former playmate's Wall Street aggressiveness, tartly observes, “Why, Peter, you've become a pirate.” (And what an inflection the grand Maggie Smith brings to that line!) The Darling house in which Wendy still lives really looks like a repository of wonderful memories, and Caroline Goodall as Peter's wife really seems to carry the Wendy genes. The London that Spielberg has reconstructed looks as if it will revert to the Edwardian era at any moment, and the sky over it positively begs for flying children.

Then Peter flies to the Never Land and … well, the movie doesn't exactly crash but it certainly stalls, gets going again, stalls again, flips over, rises rapidly in altitude, sinks sickeningly, and so on.

The sets—pirate ship, island, lagoon—are enormous but much of the action on them is stale and tinny, and the gags performed on them are worthy of only a lesser installment of the old Carol Burnett Show. The various fights only rehash and diminish the stunts from an Indiana Jones adventure and the special effects wanly recall E.T.'s. The endurance of Barrie's play and novel, despite their self-caressing twee-ness, lies precisely in Barrie's exuberant inventions (Hook's paranoia about the crocodile, the crock's ingested clock, Mr. Darling's penitential consignment of himself to the kennel) and in the mythic resonance of the story. Spielberg proves incapable of adding to these inventions, much less outdoing them. He can only reminisce and parody. Hook and Smee still have their duets of hate/love but the exchanges lack the original's strangely masochistic humor (despite the good efforts of Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins). Tinker Bell still hovers about but Spielberg feels obliged to hold his camera on Julia Roberts's face long enough for her to register her usual self-adoring smiles. The crocodile has been stuffed but still manages to swallow Hook. Spielberg and his writers add some maudlin stuff about fatherhood and maturity (“to live will be a terribly big adventure”), but there is nothing fresh in the reversals and elaborations, no indication that Spielberg absolutely had to make this movie. Even Robin Williams's occasionally funny Pan is mostly a rehash of some of his past performances.

In the middle of Hook there is a brief flashback to Pan's babyhood and the beginning of his magical career. This is a raptly beautiful episode, reminiscent of Arthur Rackham's drawings but not at all static in execution. Its unforced magic made me feel that, for once, Spielberg should have been content with the role of adaptor rather than inventor, and that he could have made a super version of the original Peter Pan instead of this half-baked sequel.

Almost nothing in Hook bores because Spielberg keeps throwing stuff at us, but almost nothing he throws is truly engrossing. This movie was obviously very carefully planned, but I don't think it was envisioned.