Hop (2011)

Hurray, it's Easter!

What sort of Eastery movies can I watch and then share with you?

Let me see... there's any number of turgid Christian propaganda pieces, or there's Hop. I'd like to say I'm as fond of turgid Christian propaganda as anybody, but that wouldn't be true; your average Christian, for example, is probably fonder of it than I am.

It's fair to say that if you show me a cute rabbit and a DVD one of the aforementioned pieces of turgid Christian propaganda, it'd almost certainly be the rabbit that got and held my attention.

So, I watched Hop for you. As it happened, there wasn't any Christian propaganda. There was The Iron Giant, but the last time I watched that particular film at this particular point in my menstrual cycle, whole households drowned in my floods of anguished tears.

Hop, then. It's about the Easter Bunny. Technically, it's about the Easter Bunny's son - he's called EB, and is voiced by Russell Brand. He's a bit of a disappointment to his father. 

Fred O'Hare (James Marsden, in what I'm 90 percent sure was a live action role) is also a disappointment to his own father. He's been out of college ten years and still hasn't found a job. This is disappointing enough, obviously, but can you imagine what a blow it would be if your 28 year old son had the face and body of a man twelve years older? A more sympathetic father would have sorted out some sort of medical help by now, surely, but Fred's dad is just so damned creeped out that he simply wants him out of the house.

As sure as chocolate eggs is eggs, our two heroes protagonists meet up and wacky adventures ensue, as EB tries to find himself and Fred tries to find gainful employment. Over on Easter Island, meanwhile, a sort of desperate version of the North Pole as portrayed in Christmas movies, Carlos the chick has decided to stage a coup (peep?).

Will the plucky adventurers save Easter, or will the world's children be forever condemned to Easter baskets filled with crickets and mealworms? If they were, would that solve our current juvenile tooth decay crisis?

The good

Fluffy rabbits are almost always cute; the animated ones on display here aren't the cutest but they're still marginally cuter than sweaty hairy men nailed to lumps of wood.

The bad

I've reviewed a lot of bad films on here, and I like to think that very few of them were completely irredeemable.

Hop, though? This goes into Room 101, with Rock of Ages and the dreaded Green Lantern. It's probably worse than either of those, in fact, because it's the total package; looks bad, sounds bad and leaves a truly foul taste in the mouth.

The absolute worst thing about it is the racism. Aside from the English Easter Bunnies, the film contains precisely two non-white characters. One of these is Carlos, fattest of the Easter chicks, who speaks with a thick hispanic accent despite all the other characters of his species bearing American accents. Carlos, it should be noted, is the villain - you can tell that because he talks about EB being privileged.

Worse, however, is Alex, Fred's adopted sister, an Asian kid of around 12 or so who's the butt of all manner of nastiness in order to make Fred (white, male, adult) look good. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? How could nobody have picked up on this and realized how incredibly ill-advised this was? The mind boggles.

Faced with this sort of bullshit, things like EB getting sexy with Fred's older sister's hair almost fade into insignificance, almost. Were they really going for an audience of teens looking for edgy thrills, and did they really think these were the sorts of viewers who'd go to a movie about the Easter Bunny? More to the point, did they really think these were the sorts of viewers who'd go for James Marsden?

The verdict

This is a nasty, ugly mess of a movie without anything whatsoever to recommend it. Avoid.