Benh Zeitlin’s followup to “Beasts of the Southern Wild” — “Wendy,” a reimagining of the girl from “Peter Pan” — has the same dreamy, lyrical vibe as its predecessor, but with a distinct difference: it’s terrible.
Our Wendy (Devin France) is a little girl in the indeterminate South who, with her slightly older twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin), hops a train and is whisked away to an island where a boy named Peter (Yashua Mack) never grows up. Nobody grows up here, as long as you believe in Mother, who is a huge, glowing fish. There’s an old man who stopped believing and that’s why he’s old. A group of other adults want to catch Mother because of reasons (probably). There’s no Captain Hook yet, but give it time.
Various things happen that don’t make sense because, hey, nothing has to make sense when you’re doing magical realism, right? It’s an aimless, meandering movie, set in a world that has no rules or boundaries and is thus hard to care about because it’s like playing Calvinball. It’s a huge disappointment.
D+ (1 hr., 51 min.; )
