Ten carat-class comedy
Peter Rabbit (PG)
95mins ★★★★
This isn’t your grandmother’s anthropomorphised, vege-stealing bunny. Those expecting a traditional take on Beatrix Potter’s morality tale will be sorely disappointed by this combination of CGI-coneys and liveaction antics. Will Gluck’s (who updated much-loved musical Annie) raucous and risque comedy is brash, brazen, bellicose and likely to be some of the best family fun you’ll have at a cinema this year.
It’s definitely not for everyone. The movie’s eponymous James Cordenvoiced (The Emoji Movie), seemingly indefatigable bundle of optimism and mischief will test the nerves, while the slap and schtick quotients seem unnecessarily high. And yet there’s something appealing about a movie that mixes vegetable puns (‘‘I’ll tell you what’s Radicchio. How easy it is to steal that man’s vegetables’’) with nods to a famous Simpsons visual gag and still finds a way to include Potter’s beautiful illustrations.
Gluck and fellow screenwriter Rob Lieber (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) focus on the arrival of Thomas McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson) to Windermere. The great-nephew of the infamous rabbit-pie-loving Mr McGregor (Sam Neill), the former Harrods employee initially only has intentions of appraising the property with a view to selling it. However, when he meets bohemian neighbour Bea (Rose Byrne), he is smitten. He then finds himself engaged in an escalating war for her affections with his worst nightmare – a vermin seemingly strangely hellbent on his departure.
While kids will definitely enjoy the CGI creatures and the carnage and wisecracks they wreak, the real stars of the movie are the main trio of human actors. Gleeson mixes comedic charm he displayed in About Time with the sensitivity he showed in Goodbye Christopher Robin and the barely repressed rage outed in The Force Awakens, while Byrne (Bad Neighbours) is a bunny-loving delight. However, the true scene-stealer is our own Neill, whose initial battles with Peter set the anarchic tone and whose montage of ‘‘78 years of terrible lifestyle choices’’ will live long in the memory of all those who see it.
Throw in a toe-tapping selection of choice, mainly Sony-artist soundtrack cuts (everyone from Len to Vampire Weekend and our own Avalanche City) and nods to Watership Down and Babe and the result is a helter-skelter, feelgood frolic.
Gareth Morgan may not be impressed at the movie appropriating his ‘‘lipstick on a pig’’ line, but for everyone else, Peter Rabbit is best described as this decade’s Mousehunt. – James Croot