Perhaps the first big-name casualty of pandemic cinema closures, Peter Rabbit now gets to hop again. Will Gluck’s follow-up to his mostly likeable original is pretty much the same formula as before but pushes the meta-quality even further. It’s fun and frenetic with little in the way of chamomile tea and more in the way of Domhnall Gleeson having a boxing match with David Oyelowo. It may not be for the Beatrix Potter purists and has a scattershot quality, but remains enjoyable for its brisk 93 minutes.
Surprisingly Gluck and Patrick Burleigh’s screenplay has knowing fun with responses to the first film. With critics lambasting the original for misrepresenting Potter’s hero as arrogant, mean-spirited and downright evil, the A plot sees Peter (“Terrible at foreign languages, great at cartoon violence”) go on a journey from selfish to selfless as, on a trip to Gloucester, he falls in with a Guy Ritchie-esque street gang led by grizzled rabbit crim Barnabas (Lennie James) and comes to realise he is not a bad sort, after all — it makes for a more appealing character all round.
It feels a little thin and generic compared to family fare like _The Mitchells Vs The Machines_, but the Byrne-Gleeson combo is winning.
The B plot takes on another pervading swipe at the first flick: the betrayal of the gentle whimsy of the original tales in favour of something loud and brash. Here, Bea (Rose Byrne) is wooed by big-name publisher Nigel Basil-Jones (David Oyelowo, embracing a rare chance to play fun), who wants to take the characters based on her family and put them on a beach or blast them into space. When Bea worries her book is going to be turned into a “sassy hipfest purely for commercial gain”, it sounds like a well-crafted line from a damning Peter Rabbit review.
Although containing some fun moments — Peter and Barnabas play whack-a-mole in a recycling bin; an escape from a domestic kitchen — the first half lacks narrative drive. It takes a hugely convoluted heist at a farmers’ market — replete with that hipster staple, “wildly mediocre folk music” — and a last-reel rescue mission to sharpen the stakes and raise the pulse. Peter’s relations — sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail (Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki and Aimee Horne), and cousin Benjamin Bunny (Colin Moody) — lack distinctive characters (another trait the film pokes fun at) but there is enjoyment to be had in incidental figures: a pig who likes to pass judgement, a fox on a fitness streak and a busking squirrel who uncannily knows the right song to play at the right time.
It feels a little thin and generic compared to family fare like The Mitchells Vs The Machines, but the Byrne-Gleeson combo is winning and Gluck injects just enough slapstick and smarts to justify the last-gasp gag about a sequel.
