Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/24/11
There is a thin, thin line
between clever and idiotic, and in any given audience, it moves pretty
wildly from person to person. On paper, the new Easter comedy Hop
seems pretty idiotic: the tale of the Easter Bunny's son who runs
away from home on the eve of the big holiday because he really wants to
be a drummer in a rock band is filled with animated critters breaking into
song, features three bunny ninjas with their own rap theme song and casts
Russell Brand in a prominent role. But comedy really is all in the
execution, and Hop is gifted with a cast of pros who go above and
beyond to sell you material most performers are content to simply allow
to wither and die on its own merits. The reckless comic abandon of
star James Marsden is truly a wonder to behold, any comedy is better for
the presence of Gary Cole, and Simpsons veteran Hank Azaria does
top-flight vocal work in a pair of roles. Fans of the Santa Clause
franchise will feel more than a little deja vu from their second installment
in particular, but I never fault a movie for stealing from the best.
In the extremely limited pantheon of Easter Bunny cinema, Hop is
an instant classic.
Twenty years ago, young Fred
O'Hare (Coleton Ray) saw the Easter Bunny (voice of Hugh Laurie) land on
his lawn in a giant chick-drawn egg and deposit candy goodies on his lawn.
Back on Easter Island, the Big Guy tells his young son E.B. (voice of Django
Marsh) how he will one day take over those duties. In the present,
neither kid has grown up very well: E.B. (voice of Russell Brand)
rebels against taking his place as the new Bunny because he'd rather pursue
his dreams of being a drummer. Fred (James Marsden) is a died-in-the-wool
slacker whose parents (Gary Cole and Elizabeth Perkins) and sisters (Kaley
Cuoco and Tiffany Espensen) stage an intervention to get him out of the
house and into a job. While driving off to house sit for older sis
Sam's boss, Fred hits someone in the road: it's E.B., who's run away
from home to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles. The talking rabbit
horrifies Fred, but also puts a pretty good guilt trip on him, convincing
him to let him stay at his temporary residence. E.B. proves to be
a handful, making a mess and ruining his a job interview at a video game
company. But he promises Fred he'll leave him alone if he just helps
him to get a spot on David Hasselhoff's TV talent show. If only that
were the biggest of the Boy who would be Bunny's problems: the lethal
Pink Berets are in hot pursuit, and the chick (Hank Azaria) who runs the
Easter Island assembly line is plotting a Coup D'etat. As the opening
narration informs us, all this will somehow lead to Fred becoming the first
human Easter Bunny.
If you're irked to not get
a day off from work around Easter, blame the Easter Bunny, a less-successful
knockoff of Santa who's all secular revelers have ever had to get excited
about. But also blame Hollywood, which has done very little to prop
the little guy up over the years. Granted, Hop doesn't do
much to make him seem like anything other than Kris Kringle's sloppy seconds,
but at least it does get his name out there. I have to say I was
unduly tickled by the notion of Easter Island as the Bunny's version of
the North Pole (those famous statues are actually secret doorways into
his subterranean workshop), and the film's vision of bunnies and chicks
laboring to produce candy for all the world's kids (or, at least all the
ones who celebrate Easter: the Bunny's visits to China have not traditionally
gone well) is at least as cute as it is familiar. Laurie offers a
solid paternal performance as the veteran Bunny looking to pass the torch,
and Brand is amusingly silly as his son. Writers Cinco Paul, Ken
Daurio and Brian Lynch have taken a few stabs at creating an Easter Bunny
Mythos, explaining how a mystical Egg of Destiny allows those who wield
its power to talk, fly around the world, etc. And apparently poop
jelly beans, for some reason. Azaria is a hoot in a dual role as
the scheming chick Carlos, who dreams of becoming the Easter Bunny himself,
and his clueless lieutenant Phil.
But what really makes Hop
better than just a tolerable kidflick is Marsden. From X-Men's
Cyclops to Hairspray's Corny Collins, he's
been quietly giving excellent performances in the background of good movies
for years, but he's never had a film this much to himself and does not
waste the opportunity. In fact, he's in with every fiber of his being,
and Fred is a truly delightful comic creation; much too old to be any kind
of acceptable unemployed slacker, but also every bit the kind of man who
would want to become the Easter Bunny. I marveled at how hard he
works to pull off sequences that would defeat most actors: at one
point, E.B. ends up on stage at Fred's younger sister's Easter play and
to save face, he has to pretend the bunny is in fact a ventriloquist's
puppet. E.B. insists on singing a song and his “puppeteer” has to
play along. These kind of “wacky critter sings a song” sequences
are almost always interminable, but watching Marsden try to sell the notion
that he's actually a ventriloquist while the unpredictable bunny keeps
making him look worse and worse is utterly delightful. His Dad grumbles
“I can see his lips move,” which is a cute line, but becomes amazing when
they cut back to Fred and he actually IS moving his lips like a bad ventriloquist
just to make sure nobody suspects the truth. Throughout, it's a performance
full of manic physical energy, outrageous reaction shots and delightful
craziness. Watching him go through an Easter Bunny training regimen
of egg-painting and outrunning dogs alone is worth the price of admission.
And he makes the already priceless Cole even funnier by giving him such
a large target to play his parental disgust against.
There are moments when the
gravitational pull of idiocy is too strong. The whole business of
the Pink Berets just goes nowhere (their rap theme song, which gets reprised
over the end credits, is so bad it's actually kinda funny, and why the
heck don't they talk?!?) and the way the script allows E.B.'s drumming
to save Easter is simply terrible. Stopping the action for a title
card reading “It's OK, folks, Easter is saved” would have been an improvement.
But given what one expects from an animal-centered kid's movie these days
(I saw Furry Vengeance on a bus trip recently and may never fully
recover), Hop is actually pretty sophisticated, its greatest sins
being ones of recycling quality material from other movies rather than
inventing crap of its own.
I don't know that it has
any chance of getting me Easter (Observed) as a work holiday, but Hop
does give one of our least-celebrated holiday mascots an amusing cinematic
moment in the sun. But most of all, it provides a welcome showcase
for a gifted comic actor in a rare leading role. Kids will love it,
and adults might find themselves being pleasantly surprised. Although,
as in all things idiotic, your results may vary. |
