Beatrix Potter adaptation in desperate need of myxomatosis

Peter Rabbit PG cert, 95 min ★★☆☆☆ Dir Will Gluck Starring James Corden, Margot Robbie, Daisy Ridley, Elizabeth Debicki, Colin Moon (voices), Domhnall Gleeson, Rose Byrne, Sam Neill

The new Peter Rabbit film could only really be improved with the addition of one thing: myxomatosis. This must be the most bewilderingly tone-deaf adaptation of a beloved children’s book in years. The director is an American, Will Gluck, whose previous film was the equally ill-advised 2014 remake of Annie – but those of us still clinging to the memory of Gluck’s superb 2010 high school comedy, Easy A, know that he is capable of working up comic chemistry with access to the right actors and a range of comedically promising scenarios. Peter Rabbit does feature a handful. It’s just that none of them has much to do with Peter Rabbit himself.

This version of Beatrix Potter’s best known creation is a smart-talking CGI pain-in-the-bobtail, voiced by James Corden. At the start of the film, Peter tries to insert a carrot into the exposed gluteal cleft of Mr Mcgregor (Sam Neill) – a jape that ends with Mcgregor dying of a heart attack. Peter then gloats about having killed the old man before poking the still-warm corpse in the eye to

check he is dead. And this is just the amuse-bouche.

Along comes Mcgregor’s nephew Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson), a neurotic London twit who inherits the Lake District property and vows to sell it. So Peter and friends trash the place, causing Thomas to seek revenge with electric fencing and dynamite. He just has to keep it secret from the rabbits’ human ally, his coquettish neighbour Bea (Rose Byrne). Gleeson and Byrne’s scenes are fun enough to make you wish that Gluck had ditched the digital animals and made an all-human countryside screwball comedy instead. Much fuss has been made over a sequence in which Peter and friends pelt Thomas with blackberries – to which he is fatally allergic. And it is a horrible scene – because Peter is an irredeemably nasty piece of work.

I might have been able to live with the twerking, the auto-tuned songs and the English characters talking about their “butts”. But who’d want to cheer on a bunny who’s this much of a swine?