Movie Review: 'Peter Rabbit'

Peter Rabbit is the latest in a long line of kids movies based on dignified and beloved works of children’s fiction that replaces the dignity with shrill, unfunny modernity. Peter Rabbit takes Beatrix Potter’s lovely rabbit stories and wipes it’s furry feet on them with a terrible pop soundtrack and sub-Home Alone style gags so jarringly violent you begin to wonder if they belong in a kid's flick.

Peter Rabbit (James Corden) is a mischievous, blue jacket-wearing rabbit who enjoys wreaking havoc in the garden of Mr. McGregor (Sam Neill). That is, until one day when Mr. McGregor up and dies while attempting to kill Peter. No, that’s not something I am making up for effect; the guy dies in the first ten minutes. The death is played with comic effect but it is a nonetheless dark way to start the movie.

Peter and his family, including Cotton Tail (Daisy Ridley), Flopsy (Margot Robbie), Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki) and Benjamin (Colin Moody) then take over Mr. McGregor’s home and garden on the assumption they have won the place. They throw a party for their comically anthropomorphized animal buddies and begin to wonder where this adventure will take them next.

Meanwhile, in London, Thomas McGregor (Domnhall Gleeson) has just found out that he did not get his prized promotion at Harrods Department Store and went a little mad. Fired, he finds that his long forgotten Uncle has left him a country cottage. With nothing else to do, he heads for the country and sparks up a rivalry with Peter and his family while he attempts to rebuild the cottage and sell it.

Thomas’s plans begin to change when he falls for his neighbor Bea (Rose Byrne), an artist who is also a part time caretaker for Peter and his family. Thomas must try to hide his hatred of rabbits while he romances Bea and while Peter and friends set about trying to get back into their beloved garden where they get their sustenance and where Peter’s father was killed years earlier by the elder McGregor, in yet another bizarre and dark reveal.

From there, the plot devolves into a series of dark and violent conflicts between Thomas and Peter. When Thomas captures Benjamin, we watch as he intends to drop the rabbit into the river inside a potato sack. When Peter and his family figure out that Thomas has electrified the garden fence to a degree that most prisons would find excessive, they rewire the fence to Thomas’s door, which sends violent shocks into Thomas that send him flying several feet in the air, violently slamming against nearby furniture, Joe Pesci-Home Alone style.

The final conflict finds Thomas throwing lit dynamite sticks at the rabbits and Flopsy and Mopsy playing out a death scenario where Mopsy mistakes a blown up tomato for blood and believes she is dying. Peter then nearly does die in one of the explosions before he accidentally blows most of the stash of dynamite, which happened to be in their tree, nearly killing everyone.

Again, I will grant that all of this is played with a Looney Tunes level of comic intensity. There is no real danger involved, unless you’re an old man with a heart condition. That said, I don’t understand why the degree of violence in Peter Rabbit is necessary. The violence is never funny, not that much of anything in Peter Rabbit, including star James Corden, is particularly funny, but it’s also rather pointless.

The stakes are so meaningless and the characters so stilted that you can’t get invested in any of it. Peter isn’t a fun protagonist. He’s not a victim, despite what happened to his parents. He’s not a charming Bugs Bunny type. He’s a spoiled jerk surrounded by enabling family members who repeatedly risk their lives for little gain. When the film calls for his redemption arc, the film has to employ a strange, logic-defying bit of Rabbit Ex-Machina to move the plot toward a contrived happy ending.

Peter Rabbit was co-written and directed by Will Gluck, a good director who needs to stop with the love of modern pop music. Gluck’s movies are like being in a car with the radio stuck on the worst Top 40 station in America, one that only plays the most bland of white people pop and the most generic audience friendly hip hop. His Annie adaptation was a brutal exercise in the modern pop musical and now Peter Rabbit follows up with a soundtrack that makes Annie look like the best DJ mix in the world.

Gluck employs a schtick throughout Peter Rabbit wherein a trio of birds sings Peter Rabbit-themed versions of modern pop songs, only to be violently interrupted as they perform. I’m not kidding; the birds are repeatedly run over by the other characters mid-song. Granted, the songus interruptus is welcome in the midst of how terrible the music is, but was the violence necessary? Was the violence in any of Peter Rabbit necessary?

Peter Rabbit is not all bad. The animation of Peter and his family is remarkable. It’s downright groundbreaking in the way it seamlessly integrates Peter and friends into the real world. Gluck is also a pro director so the movie has a good pace to it and a professional polish. The unfortunate thing is the lack of any good gags or at least some sweet hokey gags.

Instead of going for Bugs Bunny-style outlandishness or homespun, Babe-style human-animal humor, Peter Rabbit goes all violent in hopes that Domnhall Gleeson’s shrieking pain might make you smile. Poor Gleeson gets kicked, punched, electrocuted, and almost blown up and never once is it funny. The idea that violence would be a good substitute for a punchline is a bad idea and it appears that’s all of the ideas that the filmmakers behind Peter Rabbit had.