(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant recently let himself get honeyfogled into attending a performance of Hook, the $65 million (estimated production cost) filmic fantasy directed by Steven Spielberg. Steve was working in this instance for TriStar Pictures Inc., which is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., which is owned by Sony Corp. In a sense, however, Spielberg was also working for himself, Robin Williams, and Dustin Hoffman, inasmuch as each of the three idealists is known to be in for huge shares of the film's gross after revenues pass certain specified levels. It seems reasonable to lay Hook's business pedigree on the table right away, as the big news about this would-be blockbuster is its posture toward the world of private enterprise. The picture, the latest and weirdest embellishment of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, is not kind to the corporate sector. Its politically correct script tilts against real estate developers and other businesspersons, equates mergers and acquisitions with piracy, and heavily hints that high-powered M&A lawyers like Joe Flom are mean to children. To be sure, Flom is nowhere mentioned by name. We drag him into the proceedings only because (a) as senior partner of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, he is the very personification of a successful M&A lawyer, and (b) we went to high school with him. In the original Peter Pan story, you will of course recall -- unlike the present writer, who had to look all this up and still didn't get it right until the checking process took over -- Peter one evening flies in the window of a bedroom occupied by Wendy Darling and her two younger siblings in London around 1910. He leaves behind his shadow, comes back looking for it, and the next thing you know he is flying off with the Darling kids on a journey to Neverland. Are you still there? In Neverland, the whole gang plus assorted Lost Boys (i.e., orphans) have many a scary encounter with the likes of crocodiles, wild Indians (called ''redskins''), and pirates. Unlike the other children, Peter contrives never to grow up, an arrangement posited to be quite healthy, as this enables the lad to forever retain the innocence of childhood while forestalling the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world. Clear? The premise of Hook is that for some reason or other, Peter (Robin Williams) has finally grown up and has kids of his own. He is now a 40-year-old M&A guy, ever hot to trot on the deal circuit, and is umbilically attached to his portable cellular phone, established in the film's first minutes to be emblematic of his unfeeling preference for business over family. He is too busy to get to a Little League baseball game featuring his son -- an omission represented to be first-degree child abuse -- and he scores no points with the audience by sending an aide to film the game with a camcorder. An interesting question is how Sony let itself get sold on a story line that manages to equate consumer electronics with moral bankruptcy. The action requires Peter and family to pay a reunion visit to Wendy, now a nonagenarian but still living in the same old London house. Intones Maggie Smith in the Wendy role, upon greeting the protagonist and learning of his line of work: ''So, Peter, you've become a pirate too.'' Unfortunately, our guy is unable to instantly reform, as one of his $5 billion land-development deals is in big trouble and he has to take a business call from America. The disastrous news he gets on his trusty cellular phone: Some kind of endangered owl now inhabits the area set aside for the deal. Hitting ethics bottom, Peter asks plaintively whether the bird cannot possibly arrange to fornicate on somebody else's property. Here is Robin Williams's own interpretation of the character (as quoted by the TriStar publicity department): ''He has forgotten his early life as Peter Pan . . . Instead of leading the Lost Boys, he's now leading the Lost Executives.'' Words of wisdom, what? Most of Hook's action takes place back in good old Neverland, to which Peter's two kids have been hijacked by Captain James Hook, the chief pirate (Dustin Hoffman). It is Peter's challenge to return there, recapture his innocence, and fight a duel with Hook. As you might imagine, Neverland no longer has any politically incorrect wild Indians; also, the once all-English Lost Boys now have a distinctly multicultural look to them. As Maggie Smith allows herself to be quoted in another publicity release: ''It's . . . interesting to see all creeds and nationalities represented in the Lost Boys, and pirates too.'' Noble, eh? Does Peter recapture his innocence? Does he throw away his portable cellular phone? Or are people changed forever in the process of growing up? It would be unfair if not superfluous to give away Spielberg's ending, but the view in this corner is that time does change people. It had definitely changed quite a few of those who showed up some weeks back for the 50th reunion of the Townsend Harris High School class of 1941. Alas, Joe Flom did not show up for the event. Doubtless he was too busy.