I think I was being a bit of a scrimbleyshanks or a globbygoobins or something similar while watching Peter Rabbit 2. I was certainly in a mopsyheaded mood while watching this stinker. A movie I disliked so much that I think maybe I was being too charitable with the first film. Certainly, in the long run, I spent the movie wondering why I wasn’t watching the non-existent Paddington 3.

Peter Rabbit 2 follows Peter Rabbit and his gang of furry critters along with the the newly married human characters once again played by Rose Byrne and Domnhall Gleeson. Byrne’s character has self-published the first Peter Rabbit book which is getting attention from a major publisher. That publisher (and Gleeson) label Peter as a dark sheep… so Peter decides to prove it by staging a heist of the local farmer’s market. Lessons will be learned.

This movie’s schtick was done the first time around. Introduce the cutesy wootsie world of Peter Rabbit, Mopsy, Flopsy, etc. and then have them spit out random modern-sounding jokes in an attempt to be too cool for the source material. This time it didn’t work on me at all… and I was curious as to why (besides my being a poopsyhead). I normally like arch, anachronistic, or winking comedy and some of the lines should have been funny, but they almost all fell completely flat. And there were some jokes they kept repeating that were never funny from jump.

And, once again, the movie is embarrassed by its source material but also has the audacity to mock a big corporate firm that wants to monetize the series of bunny books. Har-de-har – they want to turn the books into a movie and generate a series of sequels with rescues, boat chases, and international locations… then the characters go and do that stuff in the real world of the movie. Because irony is so lost on them that they ironically have made a movie that sell-outs and offers a different version of the books… in which they pretend its distasteful to sell-out and offer a different version of the books. I guess I should applaud them for multiple levels of meta jokiness… but I think I’ll just be grumblypegs and say no.

I wanted out of this movie at about every minute of screen time. I give a tiny credit for some of the jokes landing and I guess all that meta-humor might indicate that someone at the studio had an ounce of self-awareness. But no shame.

Score: 64