Release Date – 4/1/11
The prestigious title of Easter Bunny has been carried on by the rabbits of Easter Island for as long as anyone can remember. When the current Easter Bunny chooses his son as his successor, things don’t go as planned. E.B. is the young rabbit who runs away to Hollywood to get out of all the responsibility of becoming the Easter Bunny and chase his dream of becoming a drummer. He meets a down on his luck guy who thinks he has gone crazy when he comes across a talking rabbit. So while the guy is trying to get his life together, E.B. is causing even more mayhem. I was pretty bored with the movie. The laughs just weren’t there and I’m not even sure the kids were loving it.
Russell Brand stars as the voice of the British accented E.B. He likes to play the drums and goof off and doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with the title Easter Bunny. This causes much distress to his father who of course wants it to continue in his family. When E.B. runs away, he sends out his Pink Berets (highly trained tracker rabbits) to track him down. James Marsden is a 30 year old loser, still crashing with Mom and Dad, jumping from job to job. When they give him an intervention, he realizes its time to turn his life around. But at he same time, he meets E.B. and his world is rocked even more. Marsden did what he could with the material, which isn’t much. Russell Brand was a good fit for the voice of the lead character. And also Hank Azaria does a couple voices of some of the yellow chicks that work on Easter Island. He was actually where most of the comedy came from. Smaller roles by Kaley Cuoco and Gary Cole were not important to the story at all. And then David Hasselhoff had a small role as a parody of himself.
I know the movie is meant for kids, but the kid I was with didn’t even seem to enjoy it. There wasn’t the laugh out loud silliness of something like Kung Fu Panda or the genuinely good story of something like Toy Story. The jokes missed pretty much 90% of the time. And there was really no villain for the kids to fear until the final Act. It was just James Marsden trying to hide a talking rabbit most of the time. And his dream of becoming a drummer was just ridiculous, no one even cared that a talking rabbit existed. Plus they tried to make the Easter Bunny too much like Santa Claus, flying on a sleigh pulled by little chicks. I went in with low expectations and even those weren’t met. But this movie is killing it at the box office so maybe I’m just looking at it from the wrong point of view. But my 4 year old godson wanted to leave with 20 minutes left in the movie, and this is a kid who can watch Toy Story 1-3 back to back to back 10 times in a row. So I think even he was bored with it.
IMDB – 5.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes – 24%
Movie Wiseguys – 3/10
