SOURCE: Alleva, Richard. “Fantasies & Gimmicks.” Commonweal 119, no. 2 (31 January 1992): 25-7.

In the following excerpt, Alleva regards Hook as an inconsistent and “half-baked sequel” to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.

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...