by Jacob Hirsohn, staff writer
“Hop” is a children’s movie revolving around the son of the Easter Bunny, named EB and voiced by Russel Brand. He is supposed to become the Easter Bunny, but he wants to move to Hollywood and become a drummer.
Something washed over me before this movie. For some reason, I started to think it might not be too bad.
I like the people in it, the premise is not original but possibly amusing, anything can happen. Unfortunately, I had no such luck.
Don’t get me wrong, I just know this movie is not for me.
The people who made this movie probably don’t care that I didn’t enjoy it, and will enjoy the millions of dollars that they make from it. That does not change the fact that this is a bad movie.
This movie is a combination of two genres that need to be retired: animated characters in a live-action world and unnecessary accents.
Animated characters running around on a live background and interacting with humans is awkward, clunky, and has never been a formula for a good movie.
“Yogi Bear” is one of the many disastrous examples of this genre.
The movie shows off a pretty cool looking Easter Island, one of the few parts of the movie that worked, but there’s a problem.
All of the characters are speaking in accents. The bunnies are British and the baby chicks that help them are Spanish.
Why? When did this part of Easter folklore get established?
“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” also fell victim to British accent syndrome, among many other problems.
This is one of many things that the writers just made up about the Easter Bunny.
The Easter Bunny is not Santa Claus. He is not a legendary iconic figure with a detailed story that everyone knows. He’s just the Easter Bunny.
The least they could have done is be creative.
Unfortunately, Easter Island is basically a more tropical, slightly more futuristic version of the North Pole. All of these problems, and it’s only the first scene of the movie.
After an argument with his dad, EB goes through some kind of magical rabbit hole that transports him to Hollywood. He begins wandering around, looking for a place to live.
Brand, who is relatively entertaining in his raunchy R-rated comedies, does not function as a child friendly character.
The first 10 minutes he spends with his potential caretaker, played by James Marsden, is pure sarcasm. He is sarcastic in every line.
This would get old even if this was a more mature movie, but in a children’s movie it is just unnatural.
EB gives his new friend, and the audience, absolutely no reason to like him, being rude, ungrateful, and sarcastic from the moment he meets him.
Unfortunately, Marsden’s character is such a hopeless loser that we have no reason to like him either. When we have no one to root for, there is nothing attracting us to the story.
Several painful sequences later, including EB messing up a bunch of things, and an awkward and useless cameo from David Hasslehoff, we get to a pretty weak ending that is spoiled at the beginning of the movie.
Leaving the theater, I thought I just watched a movie that was really for no one, but that didn’t stop it from winning the box office two weeks in a row.
