Just saw it on Netflix. Holy crap, it's so terrible. I remember a behind the scenes video with the cast and crew on YouTube, where they said that this movie still follows the spirit of the book, but now that I've seen the movie, I wonder what book they were reading. This movie does not resemble the books even in spirit, and the few split-second moments taken from the books are blatant mockeries of it. The characterization of the characters is completely at odds with the books also, with Benjamin being a clumsy scaredy-cat who only joins Peter out of peer-pressure. Benjamin in the books is actually closer to being like Peter in this movie, it's that messed up.
Even if this wasn't a movie based on a beloved children's book, it would still be a horrible movie. Despite being marketed as a children's film, it is full of endless crass humor. The amount of sexual innuendo goes far beyond what I normally expect from children's films. The jokes are also not funny. The movie relies almost entirely on cliches for humor, and there are a few jokes the are repeated multiple times as if the people who made this movie thought that an unfunny joke would suddenly become funny when they did it more then once. There are only two times that I ever cracked a smile throughout this movie, and even those couple of jokes weren't as funny as they could have been. The few jokes that weren't spoiled were still dumb because they were predictable as all heck. The very last line of the movie (a punch-line after Peter does yet another unethical thing), and then my brother and I said, "roll credits" directly before the credits came on, because we know our tropes. We are not stupid. This movie couldn't do anything original at all, and it is sad.
If you've seen the trailers, then you've seen the first three-quarters of the movie. There wasn't a single scene that I didn't know about until the last twenty minutes of the film came along. This movie takes scenes that could easily take up about thirty seconds, and then stretches them out to about ten minutes each. The trailers actually made the scenes look better than they actually were (even though they still weren't funny even then), because this is a blatant case of "less is more." Watching this with my brother, there wasn't a single scene within the first three quarters of the film where we didn't say "Oh, this was in the trailer."
Aside from that, the movie is full of plot holes and inconsistencies. It's made very clear that the animalsanimal speak English, because they converse with each other around humans with the humans not being able to hear them. But then, near the end, Peter and Benjamin break into a toy store, where people actually hear them talking, and the only explanation given is that people's hearts have to be into it in order for them to speak to animals. Despite this, the rabbits' owner (actually a fictionalized version of Beatrix Potter) still can't communicate with the rabbits, despite being the closest friend they have. It felt as if the director read the script and said, "this scene where they actually talk doesn't make sense." But then instead of rewriting the scene, they just threw in a bogus explanation line. Lazy storytelling at its finest.
I have a feeling that this script originally had original characters with new names, but the producers knew the script was bad, so they decided to put semi-well-known children's book characters into it just to get a wider audience. And that's not right. If the script is bad, don't use it.
Awful awful movie. Pure "rabbish."
