‘Peter Pan & Wendy’: When Will This Lost Boy Grow the Hell Up?

Just as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan remains perpetually youthful, so too does the procession of stage and screen adaptations of his tale never end—case in point being, most recently, Joe Wright’s Pan (2015) and Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy (2020). Now add to that ceaseless parade Peter Pan & Wendy, director David Lowery’s second live-action Disney re-do following 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, which by and large hews closely to its source material. Infused with bounding energy but little meaningful invention, it climbs to only modest heights, weighed down by its inability to add much to the iconic legend.

Based on both Barrie’s novel and the animated 1953 film, Peter Pan & Wendy (streaming April 28 on Disney+) is, in many respects, not very different from Disney’s other do-overs, tracing the lines of its ancestors in ways that are faithful, if not particularly interesting. It begins in London in the home of George (Alan Tudyk) and Mary Darling (Molly Parker), whose hallways and rooms resound with the sound of children—in particular, John (Joshua Pickering) and Michael (Jacobi Jupe), who are pretending to be Peter Pan and Captain Hook engaged in a titanic sword fight.

Lowery’s camera sprints and glides alongside them, up steep staircases and onto beds where they leap and laugh with uninhibited excitement. From the get-go, the action’s spirit is adolescent and dynamic, and it’s only offset by the unhappiness of the boys’ older sister Wendy (Ever Anderson), who’s presently lamenting her impending departure to boarding school, where she’ll follow in her mother’s footsteps.

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