It's good, but nowhere near as good as the reviews would have you believe

Rating: 7/10 (21 January 2007)

I had unsurmountable expectations for this one, and, alas, they remain unsurmounted. It didn't even come close. It is an entertaining film, but, as a whole, it feels half-baked. Near the end of the Spanish Civil War, a little girl, Ofelia, is taken with her pregnant mother to an old mill, where her new husband, a sadistic army captain, awaits. At the mill, she meets a fairy who leads her to a faun, who asks her to perform three tasks so she might take her place as princess of a magical kingdom. It's less a fantasy film than a fairy tale. In that way, I suppose I'm obliged to forgive that its fantasy world goes completely unrealized and remains paper thin throughout. Honestly, except for a couple of sequences, there really isn't a fantasy world. Most of the film takes place in the real world, where the Captain is trying to rid the area of some pesky rebels and Ofelia's mother is struggling to survive her difficult pregnancy. What is much harder to forgive, though, is that Guillermo del Toro extends the two-dimensionality to the Spanish Civil War setting. The Captain is a completely cartoonish bad guy, and the situation is seen completely in black and white. I mean, we're talking about a real conflict here where many people died. It's kind of insulting. If this were an American made film, people would be railing against it. It's also insulting to Spirit of the Beehive, on which del Toro has said he based the film. Where Spirit is a gentle yet effective study on the nature of human cruelty, Pan celebrates human cruelty with extremely violent sequences which are meant to be enjoyed as they are in action films (the director did, of course, previously make Blade II and Hellboy). Wow, it sounds like I hated this film! I didn't, really. I have some ideological problems with it, obviously, and I wish it were better than it is. But it is an enjoyable little horror/fantasy film. You could do better, but you could do worse, too.