Peter Rabbit – 3 out of 5
If I read the stories by Beatrix Potter that this film was spawned from, I honestly don’t remember them. I have a passing familiarity with the character but mostly just through name recognition. That being said, the trailer really didn’t impress me that much as it looked like a fairly generic children’s film that would, mostly likely, feature some fart jokes, cartoon violence and lots of pop music for the animals to dance to. However, it did have Domhnall Gleeson and Rose Byrne in it and that was enough of a reason to check it out…that and the controversy it stirred made me want to see if the outrage was warranted.
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| I'll just say it here...Peter is kind of a jerk. He learns but he's pretty insufferable through most of the movie...and not in a fun way. |
Peter Rabbit (voiced by James Corden) and his friends spend their days attempting to get at Old Mr. McGregor’s garden. One day, the old farmer (Sam Neill) suffers a heart attack and dies and the animals think their ship has come in. They immediately take over the garden but it is soon revealed that the grandnephew; Mr. Thomas McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson), has inherited the property. The man moves in and starts to bond with the neighbor, a woman who is friendly to the animals named Bea (Rose Byrne), but Peter and his cohorts wants Thomas gone and the war for the land begins.
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| If only he enlisted the help of the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The war would have ended faster. |
Peter Rabbit has some charm to it and some elements that made it a decently fun movie. I never found it laugh-out-loud hilarious but there are definitely little moments that I found very amusing. Additionally, the special effects to bring the creatures to life were very good and were able to balance the realism and cartoonish nature required to make these anthropomorphized animals believable for the universe that is being established. Finally, the performances from both the live action performers like Gleeson, Byrne, and Neill and the voice actors like Corden and others like Sia, Margot Robbie, Daisy Ridley and Elizabeth Debicki were all fantastic. They all made their characters very engaging and entertaining. The one thing that really held the movie back for me, though, was its complete lack of tonal balance.
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| I don't want to degrade the entire project but, let's face it, these two are too top shelf for this film. |
The tone when it concerns the violence in this film is all over the place and its inability to nail itself down was very distracting. At times, the violence is very Looney Tunes-esque as characters get zapped and banged around in a way that would kill a normal man but they dust themselves off and walk away ready to cause more mayhem. This dynamic will get flipped rather abruptly when the motivation behind the fight goes from “get out of here, McGregor” in a playful way to “let’s murder McGregor.” This literally becomes the motivation as Peter’s intentions are to kill Thomas as he “killed” the old man (Peter bragged he was responsible for the old man's death despite it being from natural causes--that's also very odd).
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| And to "check" if Old Mr. McGregor was alive, Peter poked him in the eye. The scene is complete with a nasty squishy noise. Needless to say, it was weird and kinda set the tone for when the violence gets uncomfortable. |
This leads to the infamous allergy scene where Peter uses Thomas’ allergy to berries to get him to go into shock. This moment is very uncomfortable because it doesn’t play out in a slapstick way but rather in a very real manner and we have to watch Thomas use an EpiPen to save himself and his recovery isn’t cartoonish like when he was zapped across the house when he got electrocuted but rather painfully realistic looking as he starts to breathe again. People say that everyone is overly sensitive nowadays but when your cartoon rabbit is literally out for murder and you have a very real looking revival after a whole bunch of cartoon violence, it is a definite shock to the system and a chaotic shift in tone. Matters aren’t helped that attempted murder is answered with more attempted murder as Thomas starts using dynamite to try and kill Peter.
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| Call me oversensitive or a "snowflake" but this scene was truly uncomfortable. |
Peter Rabbit is good for a laugh here and there and many of the technical aspects are done extremely well. The performances from the cast are undeniably good but the film does feel very generic (and, yes, it has LOADS of dancing animals to pop music—sometimes it felt like every ten minutes it was doing this). Overall, however, the hardest part to overlook is the unbalanced tone that accompanied the violence. When it is light-hearted, it is fine and fun but when this film gets dark, you find yourself watching a CG rabbit actively harming a human character and with a blatant motive of murder behind his actions. It was very strange and kinda hard to figure out why the production would end up going these routes during the story.
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