Steven Spielberg had already made Jaws, E.T. and the Indiana Jones films when he turned to Hook, a sequel to J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. The pitch is irresistible: Peter Pan grew up. Robin Williams plays Peter Banning, a corporate lawyer who has forgotten he ever flew. The film runs 142 minutes. It should be a triumph. It is not.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Peter Banning Forgot He Was Peter Pan
The premise comes from Barrie’s own ending, where Wendy grows old and Peter stays a boy. Hook inverts it. Peter grew up, married Wendy’s granddaughter Moira (Caroline Goodall), and had two children: nine-year-old Jack (Charlie Korsmo) and six-year-old Maggie (Amber Scott). He is a workaholic who breaks promises to his kids.
During Christmas, the family travels to London to visit Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith), who cared for Peter when he was an orphan. At a dinner honoring Wendy’s work with orphans, Jack and Maggie stay home with her old friend Tootles (Arthur Malet). Peter and Moira return to find the children gone, a note in the nursery signed by Captain James Hook.
Wendy tells Peter the truth: he is Peter Pan. He does not believe her. Then Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) arrives and flies him to Neverland. The film spends its first act on a man who cannot remember who he is, and its second on teaching him to be that man again.
Dustin Hoffman Plays Hook as a Fop With a Grudge
Dustin Hoffman’s Captain Hook is the best thing in Hook, and the film knows it. Hook does not recognize Peter when they meet in the pirate town. He challenges Peter to fly and save his children. Peter fails. Dismayed at how pathetic his old rival has become, Hook orders his execution — until Tinker Bell talks him into giving her three days to train Peter for their final battle.
Hoffman also voices the Pan Am pilot’s announcement, a nod to the dual role of Captain Hook and George Darling in the original play. It is a small joke that lands because Hoffman commits to it.
Bob Hoskins plays Smee, Hook’s first mate, and suggests turning Jack and Maggie against their father. Maggie resists. Jack, hurt by Peter’s broken promises and his failure to save him, starts to side with Hook. That is the film’s sharpest idea: the villain does not torture the children, he recruits one.
Rufio Leads the Lost Boys Now
Tinker Bell brings Peter to the Lost Boys’ hideout, now led by Rufio (Dante Basco). The boys mock the grown man in front of them before they finally recognize him. Then they train him.
The training is where Hook should sing, and where it mostly does not. The Lost Boys urge Peter to abandon his uptight adult demeanor and use his imagination. Spielberg shot almost the entire film on sound stages at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California. You can feel the walls.
The Lost Boys themselves are a problem of too many names and too little time. Thud Butt (Raushan Hammond), Pockets (Isaiah Robinson), Don’t Ask (James Madio), Latchboy (Alex Zuckerman), Too Small (Thomas Tulak) and No Nap (Ahmad Stoner) crowd the frame. Only Rufio registers.
The Cast Is Deeper Than the Script
- Robin Williams as Peter Banning / Peter Pan
- Dustin Hoffman as Captain James Hook
- Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell
- Bob Hoskins as William Smee
- Maggie Smith as Wendy Darling
- Charlie Korsmo as Jack Banning
- Amber Scott as Maggie Banning
- Caroline Goodall as Moira Banning
- Dante Basco as Rufio
- Arthur Malet as Tootles
- Phil Collins as Inspector Good
The cameos are a roll call of 1991. Musicians David Crosby and Jimmy Buffett, actress Glenn Close and former boxer Tony Burton appear as members of Hook’s pirate crew. George Lucas and Carrie Fisher play the kissing couple sprinkled with pixie dust. Jim Cummings provided singing vocals for some of the pirates without credit.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays teenage Wendy in a flashback. Ryan Francis, Max Hoffman and Matthew Van Ginkel play Peter at eight years old, younger, and as a baby. Lisa Wilhoit plays Tinker Bell in the flashback where Peter is a baby. Nick Tate plays Noodler.
None of it fixes the center. Williams is asked to play a man who has forgotten joy, then a man rediscovering it, and the script gives him little to do in between but shout.
142 Minutes Is the Real Villain
Hook was released on December 11, 1991, by TriStar Pictures. It grossed $301 million and became the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1991. It still failed to meet the studio’s expectations. That gap — between what it earned and what it was supposed to earn — is the whole story of its reception.
The runtime is 142 minutes. It is not a longer story than Spielberg’s best. It is a story with more in it.
Spielberg began developing Hook in the early 1980s with Walt Disney Productions and Paramount Pictures. That version would have followed the Peter Pan storyline of the 1924 silent film and Disney Animation’s 1953 film. It entered pre-production in 1985, and Spielberg walked away. James V. Hart developed the script with director Nick Castle and TriStar before Spielberg agreed to direct in 1989. Malia Scotch Marmo shares the writing credit.
A project that sat for most of a decade and changed studios, writers and directors will show its seams. Hook shows all of them.
The Score, the Tagline, the Numbers
- Release date: December 11, 1991
- Studio: TriStar Pictures
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Writers: James V. Hart, Malia Scotch Marmo
- Runtime: 142 minutes
- Box office: $301 million
- 1991 rank: fourth-highest-grossing film of the year
- Metacritic: 52/100
- Tagline: “To live would be an awfully big adventure.”
The tagline is the best writing in the film’s marketing. The movie never earns it.
What Hook Gets Right, and What It Wastes
The premise is genuinely good. An adult Peter Pan who forgot his own childhood is a story about what adulthood costs, and Spielberg is the right director for it. He made a career of childhood as a place of wonder and loss. Hook should be the capstone.
Instead, the film treats adulthood as a costume to remove. Peter does not reconcile his two selves. He picks one. The movie’s answer to workaholism is to stop being a lawyer, which is not an answer. It is a wish.
Hoffman and Hoskins are having fun. Smith gives Wendy dignity the script does not always give her. Roberts is underused as Tinker Bell, a character whose jealousy over Wendy drives Barrie’s play and barely registers as a subplot here.
The film’s most interesting thread — Jack siding with Hook — pays off in a way that costs nothing. Korsmo plays the hurt well. The script does not know what to do with it.
Hook is not a disaster. It is a disappointment, which is worse, because you can see the movie it could have been in almost every scene. The Lost Boys’ hideout, the pirate town, the final battle — all of it is built. None of it moves.
The published critical score is 5.2/10, and that is fair. Metacritic puts it at 52/100. Both numbers say the same thing: a movie with a great premise, a great cast and a great director that never becomes a great movie.
Hook Is a 5.2 of 10
Thirty-five years on, Hook survives as a curiosity. It is the Spielberg film people defend out of affection for the parts they remember — Rufio, Hoffman’s wig — rather than the whole. The whole is 142 minutes of a man learning to fly again, told without much lift.
It made $301 million and still missed. That is the most honest review the film ever got.
5.2 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
