A Holiday `Hook' -- Remake Of Classic Has Some Of The Old Spielberg Magic

XXX "Hook," with Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith, Charlie Korsmo, Amber Scott. Directed by Steven Spielberg, from a script by Jim V. Hart and Malia Scotch Marmo. Aurora Village, Crossroads, Factoria, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Kent, Kirkland Parkplace, Lewis & Clark, Oak Tree, Uptown. "PG" - Parental guidance advised, due to violence.

During the past year, millions of children have acquired their own videotapes of Mary Martin's "Peter Pan" and/or the 1953 animated Disney version - which arrived on the market almost simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the new "Star Trek" movie ends with Capt. Kirk announcing that the Enterprise will head for "the second star to the right, and straight on till morning."

Obviously J. M. Barrie, the author of the "Peter Pan" stage play and books, didn't really die in 1937. He's alive and well and living at the center of American pop culture at this moment.

The on-screen mating of Barrie and Steven Spielberg has seemed inescapable for some time, yet now that it's happened the event can't quite match the anticipation of it. Produced for a figure that's reported to be in excess of $81 million, "Hook" is diving into a market primed for an imaginative new version of Barrie's classic, and it does achieve the old Spielberg magic - but only fitfully.

Dreamed up by Jim V. Hart and Nick Castle, with additional script work by Malia Scotch Marmo and others, "Hook" puts the

grown-up Peter Pan in a situation in which he has to rescue his own children from Captain Hook, who is itching for a rematch after all these years.

Peter has become a detestable father, a workaholic attorney who can't find the time to show up for his son's baseball games or sit through his daughter's performance in a school play without listening to his beeper. He's forgotten that he was once one of the Lost Boys, and the movie is all about how he gets in touch with his feelings and wins back the love of his family.

This may sound like another of 1991's tiresome reformed-yuppie movies, but for a while "Hook" rises above the formula. Robin Williams, who plays Peter, can never be that detestable, and there's something genuinely thrilling about the scenes in which the aging Wendy (Maggie Smith) reminds him of his extraordinary past.

When the formally sadistic Hook (Dustin Hoffman) tries to win Peter's children over to his side by proving what a bad father he's been - and the discarded Tinkerbell (a suitably tomboyish Julia Roberts) demonstrates her undying love for Peter by giving him the opportunity to rediscover his childhood - Spielberg and his writers are tapping into something vital.

The film is sprinkled with lovely Spielberg touches: a latch on a window that resembles Hook's hook; a kissing couple on a bridge who levitate when they're accidentally sprinkled with pixie dust; the young Peter chasing his shadow; the grown-up Peter trying to resist the proof of Tinkerbell's existence by dismissing her as a "a firefly from hell"; a spectacularly funny comeuppance for Hook that's stolen from the finale of Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah."

Some of the most poignant touches are lines lifted directly from Barrie's play and applied in a different context.

Smith's Wendy, like the aging model for "Alice in Wonderland" that Coral Browne played in "Dreamchild," is a creature who must contend with the rich fantasy life that has grown up around the books she inspired.

These grand old Englishwomen are partly real, partly reflections of the authors who wrote about them, and when they connect with the roles for which they've become legends you can't help getting chills.

Unfortunately, the movie loses its sense of awe and whimsy about midway through, never quite recovering from a sluggish midsection in which the grownup Peter tries to find his way back to flying, crowing and fighting pirates in Neverland.

There are clever touches throughout the second half, but they don't build toward anything, and Spielberg's reach for an emotional ending exceeds his grasp.

Much has been written about the huge pirate-ship set that dominates the movie's midsection, but it's a little too impressive. At times you feel as if you've been trapped inside Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride with no way out. To his considerable credit, Hoffman makes you forget the overblown production design for long stretches, especially during his hilarious fake suicide and his mock education of Peter's children.

If the movie weren't called "Hook," you'd have to say he stole it.

It's difficult to assign a rating to a movie like this. A good deal of it is witty and magical. Some of it is downright tedious. Parts of it are well worth a three-star rating, but maybe 135 minutes is too long for any version of "Peter Pan."

Still, the good moments represent Spielberg at his best, and that's something we haven't seen enough of lately.