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‘Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway’ Review: Hare-brained fun

Peter Rabbit
CTMG, Inc

Color me absolutely stunned, based on all the obstacles placed in their way by studio mandates and bad casting choices, that the modern-day Peter Rabbit films are as entertaining and engaging as they are. The lovely little critters robbing Mr. McGregor’s farm might be a thousand miles away from the characters that Beatrix Potter established in her children’s books some 110 years ago, but once you get past that little stumbling block, they’re really solid little children’s entertainments with enough adult-oriented humor and crowd-pleasing slapstick to provide enjoyment for a family outing to the movies. Will Gluck’s Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway is only further proof of this phenomenon: it’s a charming, semi-slight film that takes its message very seriously but little else, and makes that “little else” into amusing farce. You may not remember it in the way you remember the children’s “classics” that adults tend to select as the “meaningful” ones, but you’ll have a decent enough time watching it unfold.

Following in the footsteps of the first film, Peter Rabbit 2 begins with the wedding of Mr. McGregor (Domnhall Gleason) and Bea (Rose Byrne), attended by Bea’s beloved rabbits: Peter (James Corden), Flopsy (Margot Robbie), Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki), Cottontail (Aimee Horne), and cousin Benjamin (Colin Moody). The pair have opened up a little children’s bookstore in their English country village and self-published a book about the rabbits that’s become a pretty big hit in their small community. As such, they attract some attention from a major publisher named Nigel Basil-Jones (David Oweloyo), who invites the whole family to Gloucester in order to sign Bea to a contract and make her — and the rabbits — into multimedia superstars. But Basil-Jones has his own ideas about how the rabbits should behave, and he attempts to paint Peter as “the bad seed” of the group, which the young rabbit naturally internalizes. He wanders the streets, and eventually comes across Barnabas (Lennie James), the leader of a gang of vegetable thieves who tells Peter that he knew the young rabbit’s dad back in the day, and offers him the chance to break bad and liberate vegetables from the pantries of the unassuming.

Let’s get this out of the way before we go any further: Corden easily is the worst part of this enterprise, given that he’s never entirely able to sink into the role in the way that, say, a Ben Whishaw would, and his sardonic, hyper-aware bullshit didn’t work in Cats, and it doesn’t work in this film either. His lack-of-enthusiasm and annoying nature (which is even lampshaded at one point in the film itself) create a frustrating tension with the sporting attitude of everyone and everything in it, and given how uncompelling his interpretation of “hellraising rabbit” is compared to any number of imagined casting possibilities, it’s frustrating to watch his presence squander good-faith effort. When (and if) you’re able to get past the chasm at the film’s core, you might find yourself surprised by just how fun it is. The Peter Rabbit films have proven themselves to be the best possible demonstration of Domnhall Gleason’s comedic talents, and his willingness just to go for broke and look like as much of a buffoon as possible. Whether it’s by rolling down a hill in an attempt to “frolic” to prove to Byrne that he can, or his intense obsession with his prized tomatoes — where he eats the soil they’re planted in to determine its moisture levels — his work here is what I mean by “good-faith effort.” He didn’t have to go this hard, but the film is richer for it.

As with the first film, Peter Rabbit works best when it’s operating on the same manic frequency as an old-school Looney Tunes short, though the concise nature of that format was a heavily underrated reason for the pop culture canonization of the Merry Melodies crew. Its sly anti-producer humor will likely fly over the heads of children, but when one of the cartoon bunnies glances to the camera after describing exactly what this film is doing — i.e., exploiting a classic of English children’s literature for meta gags and crude humor while having the audacity to have an American direct it — it’s hard not to think of Bob Hope doing the same sort of schtick in the Road To… films and how that trickled down to cartoon humor. But self-awareness only goes so far, and Gluck delivers some solid entertainment outside of that. There are a number of well-done slapstick sequences strewn throughout, including one where Peter and Barnabas, hiding inside of a recycling bin, become the moles in a game of “whack-a-mole” as they’re being attacked by a pair of Gloucester townspeople; or a very silly chase/fight with an angry mom convinced that Peter and his criminal pals (doing the four-child-in-a-trenchcoat gag) are raiding her pantry; or the ludicrous self-fulfilling prophecies that comprise the film’s setpiece-heavy climax, with the ante for each scene being raised in an amusingly cynical manner, following a character’s description of what their ideal finale would resemble.

It’s with that concept that Peter Rabbit 2 manages to find some measure of meaning that might surprise one with its depth, and it’s a decent message that should affect children and parents in equal measure: that how you treat and nurture another person as they grow can ultimately box them into a corner. If you’re painting your child as “the bad seed,” well, they might very well turn out to be that, because there’s no expectation of anything better for them, or because there’s a seemingly absent satisfactory explanation for their behavior. That’s not presented an excuse for naivety, however, given how the film goes out of its way to tell its audience to “trust but verify” the motives of the people they spend their time with, but it may, perhaps, be viewed by people who need that extra push to accept and love someone in their lives who might be seen as a character attribute rather than a person in need of love and care. So, yeah, if you were expecting a Peter Rabbit film to go full Terminator 2: Judgement Day and start shouting “no fate but what we make,” well, congratulations: it did, and the message seems like it might resonate, though it might have sounded just a little better coming from a critter voiced by James Corden.