BEFORE: I made it to Easter, and the chain is still unbroken - really, it's was either this film about rabbits or one about the biblical Mary - I'll pick this fictional character every time over THAT one. Just saying.
It's not just Easter, though, it's also Hayley Atwell's birthday, April 5, so we'll be sending a Birthday SHOUT-out today to her as she carries over again from "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning". I think it's probably very safe to say that I'm the only person who was watched these three films with Hayley Atwell, back to back. Probably not even her agent would do this, because the films are all so vastly different. Or, are they?
THE PLOT: Peter and his rabbit family are now living with Bea and Thomas MacGregor, who are now married. Bored of life in the garden, Peter goes to the big city, where he meets shady characters and ends up creating chaos for the whole family.
AFTER: I think I'm on to something here, even though two of these three Hayley Atwell films have been animated features, and the other a big-budget action movie, I think there's sort of a through-line, not just the fact that Ms. Atwell appears in all three of them. "Paddington in Peru" was kind of a quest movie, not just the search for the missing Aunt, but a search for the lost city, and "Mission: Impossible" was kind of about the search for that missing submarine, of course every "Mission: Impossible" film is also kind of like a heist film, and now we have "Peter Rabbit 2" which greatly resembles a heist film at one point, with Peter and his family helping a city rabbit named Barnabas steal a bunch of dried fruit from a farmers' market. OK, so that's not really the same thing as stealing from a bank or breaking in to a fortified end-of-the-world bunker, but a heist is a heist.
Another thing today's film shares with "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is that things don't exactly go as planned (do they EVER?) and some of the team members are caught, in this case all of Peter's family and friends who helped with the heist get caught by the people who run the pet shop, and they all get sold off very quickly to people who want to keep rabbits, or a hedgehog or a badger as a pet. This leads to the SECOND part of the quest, as newlyweds Bea and Thomas McGregor have to drive around the U.K. or even other parts of Europe, to put the whole gang back together at the end. NITPICK POINT: I get why the fisherman bought Benjamin Bunny, he wanted to make a rabbit stew as he was probably sick of eating fish, but WHY was this guy in Switzerland so into skiing down the alps while carrying a badger? Was this some weird fetish thing? If so, I don't want to know about it.
The good news is that they do eventually get all the woodland creatures back, but this sends a weird message out to the kids - if somebody takes your pet without any right to, the best response is to go and steal it back from them, even if they paid the pet shop for it. Umm, sure, kids need to know how to break the law to make things right, maybe taking legal action against the pet show would instill a better lesson? I suppose that would take longer, and Benjamin would have been eaten, but still, if stealing is bad then stealing something back is also bad, right? And Peter Rabbit learns his lesson (at least until next time) that him wanting to act like a "Bad Bunny" has consequences for the people and animals around him. Also, if you are a pet owner or a woman who writes books about animal characters, you do NOT take your eyes off of your pet, not even for a second. You're a bad pet mom if your rabbit is hanging out with a thieving street gang of animals, and they're planning something.
Barnabas had no intention of sharing the dried fruit with Peter's family, or making sure that they weren't captured during the heist, plus he lied when he implied that he knew Peter's father, it was just a plot to gain his trust. Another lesson for the kiddos: street people and petty criminals will lie to you to get you to do what they want. Also don't leave your parents while on holiday with them to go hang out with street trash. That's maybe a better lesson to send out to the kids at home.
But we still have to deal with why Mr. McGregor is marrying Bea (the stand-in for Beatrix Pother here, I guess) in the first place. Is that how we solve our problems now, by turning our enemies into family that we don't like all that much, and who never trust us and blame us for doing bad things when we were trying (for a while) to do only good things? Also we learn that people who work for major publishing companies are never to be trusted either, they just want to make too-hip sequels that destroy the validity of the original work. Can this be true, can the film that is an unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequel be taking a stand against unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequels? That's maybe just a bit too meta for the room, I don't think kids will get this joke, but maybe it's there for the adults to appreciate? I guess we should be thankful that they didn't make this film into a space-travel themed adventure film?
I could have done without most of the slapstick, like when they made Mr. MacGregor prove that he could "frolic" and have fun, and this just ends with him rolling down a hill and getting out of control. The way he landed, he surely should have ended up in hospital - but we get it, kids bounce more easily than adults, so we old people shouldn't do anything physical, this is ageism of the highest order though. Really, this could have been a LOT worse, I'll take this story if this really the best they could do, but it's still a complete bastardization of Beatrix Potter's tales. But yeah, heist films sell, so why not do a Peter Rabbit sequel like it's "Ocean's Twelve"?
Directed by Will Gluck (director of "Peter Rabbit" and "Easy A")
Also starring Rose Byrne (last heard in "I Am Mother"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Calvary"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "See How They Run"), Tim Minchin (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Tara Morice, Dave Lawson (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Alex Blias (ditto), Jude Hyland, Neil Hayes, Neveen Hanna, Shona Tough, Tom Golding, Tina Maskell, Andy Gathergood (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nigel Cooke, Lily Hall, Raelee Hill (last seen in "Superman Returns"), Gordon Waddell (ditto), Owen Beamond, Jonathan Elsom (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jack Andrew (last seen in "Aquaman"), Harry Peek (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Matt Newport, John Batchelor (last seen in "Man-Thing"), Eliza Logan (last seen in "Truth"), Maddison-Cleo Musumeci, Joshua Kim, Ingrid Macaulay, Zoe Cash, Chika Yasumura, Callum Macgown, Simon Edds (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Rowan Chapman (last seen in "Ticket to Paradise"), Andrea Berchtold, Dalip Sondhi, Chantelle Jamieson (last seen in "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire"), Megan Smart, Taylor Ferguson, Nick Chopping, Lance Kerfuffle, Buckminster Kerfuffle, Alexandra Gluck (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Taryn Gluck (ditto), Anthony Vercoe, Anton Grimus, Mia Willis, Russell Penton, Isla Hawkins, Dean Gould, Yasca Sinigaglia, Stephen Murdoch, Philip Partridge, Mike Duncan, Connor Van Vuuren, Buffy Anne Littua, Renee Ware
with the voices of James Corden (last seen in "Begin Again"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Z for Zachariah"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "The Tale"), Aimee Horne, Colin Moody (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Lennie James (last seen in "Colombiana"), Damon Herriman (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Rupert Degas (last heard in "Planet 51"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Backtrack"), Sia (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit")), Ewen Leslie (ditto), Will Reichelt (ditto), David Wenham (last seen in "Elvis"), Matt Villa, Stewart Alves,
RATING: 5 out of 10 release delays (due to the COVID pandemic)
