Pan trailer: Hugh Jackman's Captain Blackbeard appears very camp

Jackman plays the villainous boat-looter in the 2015 film that promises to tell "the untold story… of the timeless legend" of Peter Pan. (Hook, if you're wondering, hasn't caught the evil bug yet: here he's played by hunky Garrett Hedlund as an Indiana Jones-alike – hat and all – who's all set for an Anakin Skywalker-style turnaround.)

In the just-released trailer, we first meet young Peter (Levi Miller) at the Lambeth Home for Lost Boys (get it?) where he demonstrates his latent anti-authoritarian streak by defiantly throwing his gruel to the ground in the dining hall. Just as he is dreaming of a less Dickensian place to be, a land far away, a band of Cirque du Soleil escapees raid the orphanage and take him away on a floating pirate ship.

Director Joe Wright is no stranger to radical takes on familiar tales – he set his last film, Anna Karenina, entirely on a theatre stage. Here, Neverland is reimagined as a kind of copper mine on the American frontier and the Piccaninny Tribe (you'll remember them from the racist parts of the Disney movie) look like a group of Splendour-bound festival kids, with acclaimed indigenous actor Jack Charles as their chief and Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily.

The pirates are led by Jackman's Blackbeard, who sports a shiny, bald head and a moustache and goatee that wouldn't look out of place in a hipster bar. He snarls like "well, well, well, the princess I presume?" (No sign of any moustache-twirling thus far.) He also wears feathery collars… and cuffs.

He's a less wobbly pirate than Depp's Sparrow, less prancing, but every line seems to scream "theatre!", and every beautifully rendered Neverland backdrop looks set to be chewed.

Will his big-budget pirate-movie turn prove as popular as Depp's? Place your bets.

And while we're gambling: how many minutes into the film before the handsome James Hook meets his croc?

 

Fairfax Media