I didn’t really know what to expect out of this movie. Between the initial trailer being as middling as it was, it being one of the first films to be made to do the COVID shuffle, and the original being so wildly inconsistent, I went into this follow-up without much expectation, other than hoping it wouldn’t derail itself with food allergies again. And to its credit, it left the realistic Epi-pen shit alone this time around… but it still managed to derail itself. In monumental, rubber-necking, legitimately infuriating fashion. Slow claps all round.
But before I start tearing into this thing’s guts, let’s maintain fairness while my brain is still lucid enough to do so and get into what this film unquestionably got right: The visuals. Aussie studio Animal Logic continue to hit the elusive sweet spot for talking animal movies, keeping the animals realistic enough to work next to real-life locales and characters, while maintaining a degree of cartoonish expression to avoid any Lion King remake-esque disconnect between the faces and the voices that come out of them. Outside of some stray moments where Domhnall Gleeson gets turned into a CGI ragdoll for the sake of slapstick, it looks really damn good.
It also sounds a lot better than I remember the original being as well. James Corden still grates on my nerves (much as the film tries to lampshade how annoying his voice is… and ooh boy, we will get into that chestnut in greater detail further down), but the rest of the cast all fit very nicely. Even the newer names like Lennie James as thief rabbit Barnabus and live-action David Oyelowo as a book publisher slot in with the returning cast. For as much bile as I will end up spewing about this thing in a bit, let it be known that I don’t hold any of that against the actors themselves. Nor do I hold it against the soundtrack which, apart from a tired montage set to Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, is far less tacky than before and isn’t nearly as embarrassing.
As for the content at the heart of all this presentation, it’s a definite step down from the original just in terms of plotting. Its predecessor may not have stretched much further than once-removed Looney Tunes antics as far as ‘plot’, but it was at least consistent in that regard. Here, it’s a lot more all-over-the-place. In-between Bea and Thomas negotiating with Oyelowo’s publisher, we have Peter going through what I think is a character dilemma about whether he’ll be a mischievous bad seed or a proper good guy (not that the acting makes it easy to care either way, bear in mind), a heist in a farmer’s market that is far less exciting than any of the war homage moments of the original, and a rescue mission that… I can’t really get into how much it doesn’t work without getting into this film’s massive central problem.
More so than the first film, what this really got me thinking about was writer/director Will Gluck’s remake/retooling of the musical Annie. Mainly, because this film pissed me off for a lot of the same reasons, largely to do with how badly he tries to have his cake and eat it too in terms of this film’s place as part of a larger franchise. It functions a lot like those Dr. Seuss movies from the 2000s (along with The Lorax), where the filmmakers thought that admitting that they were engaging in cynical garbage, disregarding the source material in the process, was enough to excuse the fact that it was still going along with it. Here, that mentality manifests in how Oyelowo acts as the villain, trying to get Bea to rewrite her books to be more ‘hip’ and trend-chasing, rather than sticking to what made them good in the first place.
It’s trying to be cute about how both this film and its predecessor diverged from the source material, winking at the audience when the on-screen Bea says she’d be rolling in her grave if an American took her books and turned them into a movie that didn’t represent what she created… I can actively feel my blood pressure rise just typing that out, and watching it unfold in real-time isn’t much better. I mean, I don’t know all that much about the original books, or just how much these films swerve away from them, but I don’t feel I need to to recognise how aggressively pretentious all this is. Poking fun at focus-grouping and corporate interference might have worked better if you didn’t have a scene where execs are glared at for suggesting the rabbits go through chase scenes and rescue missions… and then have all of that take place in the bloody finale, while Bea narrates (all of a sudden, because ‘look how cute and meta we’re being, tee hee hee’) that this “never happened in her world”.
It’s all just so smug and plainly hypocritical
that, whether I giggled at certain points or not, I cannot say that I enjoyed
sitting through this. Like, at all. I once again admit to not being in the
target audience for such things, and it’s certainly not the worst talking
animal movie I’ve had to deal with. But when comparing the spectacular
animation with the desperately dogshit writing, it’s hard not to get
aggravated at how much talent is being wasted on this drivel.
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