Hop (2011)

SPOILER: I'm going to probably spoil a lot of plot points here for any one of you who want to see this movie. If you're one of those people...well, I feel sorry for you and don't read this until after you've seen it. For all you others, let's hit the plastic grass running.

Okay, I have to get this off of my chest first. I know that people like to watch seasonal movies because there is no better way to celebrate a given holiday. I'm all for it, but you know what; why would you want to make a movie that makes you NOT want to celebrate that holiday?

It's a Wonderful Life makes you want to celebrate Christmas and good will towards men and all. Halloween actually puts me in the mood for scary masks, dark nights, lots of candy and general scariness. The Quiet Man is the perfect movie for St. Patrick's Day. Groundhog Day is great to watch on...well, you get the idea of what I mean.

And it's not like we have a dearth of Easter movies. Fred Astaire's Easter Parade is a good one, so are Jesus Christ Superstar, Meet Me In St. Louis and Harvey (What? ...it has a rabbit in it!). Then we have a whole slew of kiddie movies and TV specials that deal with the Easter Bunny and his various incarnations and adventures to choose from.

WHY, then, did someone feel the need to slop one more Easter Bunny tale into an already-overloaded basket by giving us a CGI-dominated live-action cartoon about not only an Easter Bunny, but an Easter Bunny who'd rather do something else???

This is what we get in the movie Hop, which not only has loads of fluffy bunnies, fuzzy yellow chicks and a Technicolor world of candy, eggs, bows, ribbons and baskets, but stupidly contrived situations, sitcom-level humor and the outrageous misuse of three (THREE) actor's voices who are the most talented, entertaining and delightful voices to listen to.

Let's hop head-first into this gaping maw of a plot: starting far off on Easter Island (naturally), this is the story of E.B. (voiced by Russel Brand), the Easter Bunny's teenage son whom is poised to take over the business from his dad - who is never known as anything more than E.B.'s Dad but is more-or-less the Easter Bunny (voiced by Hugh Laurie). However, E.B. has bigger fish to fry and larger eggs to hide as he decides to chuck it all and head to Hollywood, determined to become a drummer in a rock 'n' roll band.

Once E.B.'s Dad discovers his disappearance, he calls out The Pink Berets (female bunnies in pink berets, natch, and with commando fighting moves) to fetch him back before the big day (Easter), which is only a couple of weeks away. Meanwhile, the head of the Easter factory, a fuzzy little chick named Carlos (voiced by Hank Azaria) determines to take over the whole trade and wrest the Magical Easter Sceptre away from the bunnies so that he and his fuzzy yellow minions will rule the holiday forever and stuff the kids' baskets with chicken feed and nice plump night crawlers. Yum.

Now with E.B. in Los Angeles, he almost immediately gets hit by a car driven by professional slacker Fred O'Hare (James Marsden), who is house-sitting for a client of his sister Sam (Kaley Cuoco), and trying to get a job so as to get his nagging dad Henry (Gary Cole) and disappointed mom Bonnie (Elizabeth Perkins) off his back. Once convinced that this anthropomorphic talking bunny is actually a soon-to-be Easter Bunny and wants to be something more than what he is, Fred tries to help him and, in the process, help himself.

Along the way they will run into David Hasselhoff, man-eating dobermans, The Blind Boys of Alabama, a grade-school play and a showdown with Carlos and his cute adorable yellow foot soldiers as they all threaten to destroy Easter forever.

Oh, this'll no doubt be gobbled up by the Disney Channel crowd who craves loud music, dumb grown-ups and colorful characters, but let me get to a few points first of all, for those of you who crave the facts of the matter.

The direction, by Tim Hill, will surprise absolutely no one who has seen Hill's previous directing credits - Muppets From Space, Max Keeble's Big Move and two other animated hits, Garfield: A Tale Of Two Kitties and Alvin And The Chipmunks. All is big and colorful and as subtle as an Easter Egg under a steam roller. To be honest, the look of this film is what's to be expected of most kid's movies nowadays - with the only adornment in the CGI, rather than the S-T-O-R-Y.

This script, concocted as it is by Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch, gives us a storyline that is no more or less complicated than your average sitcom episode, with the prerequisite big dumb adults who don't understand anything and the kids who understand things all too well. This was old news when John Hughes initiated it into the American subconscious back in the Eighties. But with one major change this time around:

Instead of focusing on the Easter Bunny - or even the Easter Bunny's offspring, this story is all focusing on Fred, this late-in-life slacker/loser who's supposed to be at least in his twenties but looks all of his 30+ years here. I mean, here is someone who has no motivation, no desire to leave the nest and puts absolutely no effort into trying to better his lot in life. And the film even starts off - during the beginning credits - as showing how Fred himself becomes the NEXT EASTER BUNNY! I swear to you, they spoil their own movie before the titles are even finished!! So what Hop amounts to is a flashback movie about how past events led up to the beginning exposition.

Okay movie, you ruined your own story for me. Now how are you gonna make it up to me? And no one better sing "I Want Candy", either....

Everybody in this movie is stupid. And I mean everybody. Cole doesn't show any of the glimmer of style and hipness he did in his breakthrough TV series "Midnight Caller" or even as the unctuous boss in Office Space. Elizabeth Perkins is a million light years removed from her sparkling turns in movies like Big, Sweet Hearts Dance, The Doctor and even her turn as Celia in the TV series "Weeds". Cuoco is basically playing her character in "10 Simple Rules", only not as bright. And Marsden....

Ooooohhh...Marsden. He does his whole grinning idiot shtick for the umpteenth time and, while it apparently served him well in the remake of Death At A Funeral, it just makes him look like the poster boy for Ultra Bright here. When you go from playing Cyclops in the X-Men movies and get a semi-respectable series of film roles in such works as The Notebook, The Box and a winning turn in the Disney Studios spin on their own fairy tales Enchanted, and go down to a role that might as well have gone to Jason Lee acting against CGI chipmunks, you've definitely made a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

The cartoon voices, to be honest, do fare better. But you expect a lot more from them. Brand invests E.B. with what you would expect a big-eyed, floppy-eared bunny in a ratty blue plaid flannel shirt to sound like. Brand's high voice usually strains for upper-class British twit-ness but here seems to fit a younger character quite well. You'd expect that, I'd guess, but from one of comedy's bad boys? In a kids' film? About Easter? Unexpected, I'll give him that much. Fans of Get Him To The Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall will wish he had more to say and the ability to say it how he wants to. He's just playing it cutesy here (as he should, I suppose), but it just lacks the oomph you expect.

Same goes for Laurie, who's more familiar with kiddie fare (see 1996's 101 Dalmatians redux and Stuart Little for examples), and also has a voice that resonates and can be outright silly when the situation calls for it. But playing E.B.'s stuffy dad doesn't give him much more to do than to act stuffy. It's like watching Alastair Sim play a mute butler who doesn't get a chance to move very much. I would have loved to have heard him make a lot more out of his opportunity but, alas, he doesn't.

The best voice in the whole thing belongs to Azaria, who does vocal acrobatics around his counterparts as a Latin-tongued Easter chick who often breaks into malevolent diatribes and declamatory speeches to his followers. You look forward to Carlos' scenes the most because - let's face it - the villain is usually the most interesting part in kids' movies like this. And Azaria knows it...at least that was one good move on the film-makers' parts.

In fact, it would seem that Hill and his writers didn't even care about any of their live actors. This isn't about them anyway, no matter what the story tells us. This is about their cute little CGI characters. And there are a lot of them here. Hundreds of bunnies, thousands of chicks. Universal Pictures seems to have fallen into the same rut that Dreamworks Pictures has: all of their kiddie product has become so dumbed down and cloying that the image is more the message than the actual script is. And while the animators' list goes on for a country mile, and there are fabulous images here and there - the inside of the Easter candy factory is dazzling, as is the detail in every bunny whisker and bit of fluff on a downy chick - but this is the whole thing that Hop hangs its bunny ears on. The look. Which is there, but that's it.

The script lets us down time and again. While purporting to be about poor little E.B. and him being torn between what he wants to do and what he should do, we also bounce into clumsy human antics, Marsden falling all over himself and mugging into the camera every five minutes, unexplained scenes by the carload (What use is there in the whole mansion-sitting thing, if you're not going to even have a scene where Fred checks out every room in the house, accidentally trips an alarm or something funny like that? Why have guard dogs if they're not going to be used in the story but two or three times? Why don't other humans who see E.B. move and talk make a bigger deal about a walking and talking rabbit? Why does E.B. poop jelly beans, exactly - if just for a lame sight gag?) and a thoroughly unwarranted cameo by David Hasselhoff.

David Hasselhoff. Remember how funny his cameo was in The Spongebob Squarepants Movie? Don't expect that here: if you've seen an episode of "America's Got Talent", you've seen all you need to of Hasselhoff here. He makes a "Knight Rider" reference, wears his black leather pants and matching jacket, looks around him in a daze then walks away to greet his adoring fans. That's it.

Oh, and when it comes to unwarranted cameos, what exactly is Hugh Hefner doing in a kiddie movie? Sure, E.B. has to show up at the Playboy Mansion under the pretense that there's a bunny head on the front gate, but Hugh Hefner? Even in voice alone? How would YOU like to be the parent explaining the significance of Hugh to six year-old Cindy while the other adults in the audience give a knowing chuckle?

Is there anything good in Hop? Besides the CGI? One scene: in the mansion Fred's babysitting, his sister Sam checks up on him and discovers E.B. in a pile of stuffed animals and snuggles him, to which the bunny strokes her hair and lasciviously makes the most of, at one point even trying to steal a kiss, as Fred pantomimes anguish and frustration towards him. That was funny.

In the end, nothing in Hop really makes you want to celebrate Easter. This is all just another repackaging of a holiday for the modern-day attention-deficit mentality of audiences. Which, by that definition, seems to have worked: this $63 million enterprise earned back its whole budget plus in two weeks' time and I'm sure will earn even more. Not that this is something to be proud of, mind you.

I don't know what I was expecting from Hop, but it certainly wasn't something that celebrated the advent into holiday films of dumb humor, slackers finding themselves and raw turkeys in flannel shirts being mistaken for rabbits half their size. I guess I was expecting something more...I don't know...more Eastery.

As it is, Hop will make you want to renounce your Easter bonnet...but you will love the fluffy animals.

Just don't eat any of their jelly beans.