Peter Pan

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * )

Those of you who trawl the internet to find movie and DVD reviews will know what it means to come across the line, "Spoiler Warning". It means someone is going to give away a really important plot detail.

So here's our Spoiler Warning: gosh, there are not a whole lot of great DVDs/videos on the shelves this weekend.

Strangely, to mark the centenary of J.M. Barrie's story of a quintessentially English childhood, we have a movie shot in Australia by P.J. Hogan of Muriel's and My Best Friend's Weddings, with money and technical assistance from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic on the other side of the Atlantic.

Hogan's take on the turn-of-the-century tale focuses rather more on the coming-of-age aspects of the story than earlier versions. Wendy (Rachel Hurd-Wood) is a 12-year-old girl "on the verge of becoming a woman" and about to fly from the nursery, the children's room that she shares with her two younger brothers, Michael and John. She tells them bedtime stories of Captain Hook and his pirate crew, of Neverland and Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.

But this is a fantasy of mirror images. Peter leaves Neverland at night to listen to Wendy's stories. After one visit his shadow is caught in the window. When he comes back to get it, Wendy sews it back on, and Peter invites the Darling children to fly with him back to Neverland and tell stories to his pals, the Lost Boys. The story is probably coming back to you by now: Wendy and her brothers meet the lads and battle Hook who is, in the mirror-world that Barrie insisted on, played by the same actor who plays the children's banker-father, Mr Darling (Jason Isaacs, best known as Harry Potter's Lucius Malfoy).

The look of the movie is stunning: from a picturebook Victorian London to special effects like flying. It runs through the emotions, from love, tenderness, loss, thrills, laughs. But it runs through them rather than engaging them and, one suspects, loses its younger audience somewhere along the pathway.

The DVD rendering is vibrant and the soundtracks is dynamic. There's not a lot of bonus material: quick behind-the-scenes of the various sets such as the pirate ship, the Black Castle, the Darling House, the Neverland Forest and the underground home, plus interviews with the groups of characters (Jason Isaacs and his characters, the Lost Boys, mermaids and so on). In a clear nod to the US market, the longest feature — The Legacy of Pan — trails the history of Barrie's character, hosted by Sarah Ferguson.

* DVD, video rental May 13