Who remembers the  movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Live action movie with a cartoon rabbit drawn in over the film.  Not the greatest movie, but a cult classic now.  Well, Hop is almost exactly like that except I highly doubt it will ever reach cult classic status.

Quick summary:  the main rabbit character is E.B – the future Easter Bunny.  Poor chap doesn’t want to be the Easter Bunny, he wants to be a drummer.  He runs away from home, and stumbles into a professional no-job loser Fred (played by James Marsden).  Fred’s Dad told him he could be ‘great’ when he was a kid, but Fred’s ambition for greatness has limited his ability to grow up.  Somehow to two become friends and save Easter from a Latin Chicken.

Hop is one fourth buddy movie, one fourth a Christmas movie, one fourth a family movie, and one fourth good.

So, lets start with that good part.  Visually, the rabbits and their Easter Island factory looked pretty good.  Nothing that made my jaw drop but definitely good enough for me to appreciate.  E.B was voiced by Russell Brand and while I originally was worried about him as a voice actor, I was pleasantly surprised by his work on Hop.  In fact, between the decent graphics and the good voice acting I’d go so far as to say E.B. was a very likable character – almost cute even.  Almost.  However, there is no doubt in my mind that the scene stealer in this movie was David Hasselhoff.  By hamming it up to the max, David was one of the few parts of this movie that actually made me laugh.

And that is probably a good place to start nitpicking Hop.  Dialogue in this movie is forced and awkward and rarely fluid.  I’m not sure if the cause of this problem is writers trying to hard to be funny, or a script that didn’t know how to make an Easter Bunny story seem natural.  Maybe some of both?

True, there aren’t a lot of Easter Bunny stories.  Or legends, or fables, or anything.  So, it’s hard to decide how the world would react to a talking rabbit with a British accent and a desire to bang the drums all day.  The problem is, while I may not know how the world would react, I’d like it if my writers would decide and then stick to it.  Sometimes people freaked out.  Sometimes they shrugged it off.  In one scene E.B. is pretending to be a puppet, the next he’s ordering carrot cake at a diner, and then the next he’s a stuffed animal.  Very back and forth.

In a way, that inconsistent reaction to E.B. is a great example of the much larger problem in this movie.  Why does anyone do anything?  WHY?!  I never got a sense for why the chickens tried to take over Easter.  I never understood why Fred wanted to be the Easter Bunny.  I still have no clue why Fred’s sister was so nice to him or why the rest of his family acted like he was human garbage.  I don’t have the slightest clue why the ending went down the way it did.  (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but lets just say the Easter Bunny grants a wish for someone that goes completely against the rules of Easter according to movie.)

Most of the movie made little sense if you thought about it for half a second.  Characters were way to willing to accept things that didn’t make any sense at all.  Stuff just happened and everyone moved on.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  The movie wasn’t bad.  I didn’t groan or roll my eyes or suffer through at all.  I scratched my head a few dozen times, but even when it was just weird it wasn’t wrong.  Depending on your sense of humor, it is entirely possible to sit down and watch this whole movie and feel good and move on with your life when the credits roll.  To me, though, it was just sort of ninety minutes of quasi-entertainment with no thrills and only a couple of laughs.  It was there, I was there, and together (somehow) we made it through. I do think kids will like it (the younger the better) but it doesn’t offer anything you can’t already find in any other animated movie.

In the end I’m going to give Hop a simple 2 Easter Eggs.

It’s not a movie I’d suggest going to see in the theater, but maybe later this  year grab it from Netflix for the kids to watch.  That’s about the best I can offer.