I knew director P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan was in trouble right from the opening shot. We swoop in from the night sky to see the tower tops of London, and instead of being enchanted by the wintry setting, I notice immediately that it's computer-generated. Not bad per se, but this cityscape looks conspicuously computer-generated. If I can't believe in the first shot, how am I supposed to buy the rest of this fantasy in which believing is everything -- especially when the fake opening shot doesn't even show something that's meant to be make-believe?

Thus begins the many problems for a film grappling and struggling with its essence throughout its entire running time. At the center, Peter Pan ought to be a story about discovering a place so tempting for a child to stay in, he or she might forsake the possibility of growing up just to live there. This place isn't evil, either -- it's magical, full of adventure and danger, where grown men are villains and the kid societies get to make up their own rules. A decision to leave therefore comes from the realization that, inevitably, we must all grow up. But, most importantly, the place called Neverland must be convincing in order for any of that to work.

However, both the worlds of London and Neverland feel so unsettled in this movie, it should have been titled Lost Boy instead of Peter Pan. Hogan doesn't know when to start and stop playing down to his audience of children, and so he turns the immature goofiness on and off without warning. As the dog flips a kid into a bathtub, or the kids slide across the floor and collide with a bunch of bankers while papers fly all around the air, one gets the idea that the world is pretty silly. As a result, little about the "real" world is given weight. When Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) and her brothers finally fly away with Pan (Jeremy Sumpter), no one has a sense of what is being left behind.

Neverland doesn't fare much better. First, the flying effect is very jarring, and it's hard to get past that. I usually don't grouse about bad special effects, but flying is such an essential element here that the fakeness of it bothered me all the way through. Neverland itself looks very movie-set-like in all its various locations, from the pirate ship (and the pirates themselves, who are made-up in a cartoonish style) to the Lost Boys' den. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but since almost everything else so far hasn't felt real, the Neverland sets only further aggravated my attempts to suspend disbelief. As a result, I kept comparing in my mind the sets from this movie and from Hook, and thinking about Hook is never a good thing while trying to get comfortable in the world of Peter Pan.

At some point, I had to give up. I could see Hogan wanted to instill his version of Pan with a little darkness -- there are numerous night shots and some supposedly emotional moments, not to mention ominous mermaids and a truly murderous Captain Hook (Jason Isaacs, who also plays Wendy's dad) -- so why did all the broad strokes keep coming? Tinker Bell's presence is the most glaring -- she's played by Ludivine Sagnier as a spastic, mugging little annoyance. Every close-up of Tinker Bell must have come with an instruction to Sagnier to make as googly-eyed a face as possible. The character is wicked and practically beyond redemption -- yet her fate is the stake for what was meant to be the movie's most powerful scene. It doesn't work.

Also knocking us out of the film's realm is a terrible-looking animatronic parrot -- it couldn't be played by a real bird because it's supposed to be scruffy and decrepit, as if it were  80-years-old, but the thing ended up looking like a wind-up toy run over multiple times by a truck. By the time the gigantic, glowing-eyed, fake crocodile showed up, I was beginning to marvel that a real St. Bernard had been cast as Nanny. 

While Hurd-Wood gets by rather nicely as Wendy, Sumpter is only half-convincing as Peter Pan. He's by turns smirky and petulant, but he fatally lacks charisma. Watching him, one does not feel the inclination to join him and fly away to another land. In the scene where the children leave, Pan doesn't do much to sell Neverland; they follow him almost solely on the prospect that they will get to fly. And therein lies yet more evidence that what this movie lacks is actual enchantment, rooted in giving the audience something to really believe in. Credible mood and atmosphere are absent in the face of parental caricatures, cross-eyed fairies, and, in one scene, a solar system background that looks like it came from the transition scenes in 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Still, isn't this all supposed to be make-believe in the first place? Yes, but there's something about make-believe we must understand: the best moments of make-believe come  when we really believe in it. Enjoying good make-believe is like being under a spell. This Peter Pan seems to be too aware of its own make-belief, as if the film is constantly reminding its audience that, no, this place doesn't really exist. It's only a story, right? Wrong -- it's James M. Barrie's beloved "Peter Pan." And just as fairies can't exist unless we actually believe in them, Peter Pan can't fly unless his world truly hooks us in.

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "PG" for adventure action sequences and peril.) 

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.