I have a real soft spot for 2018s Peter Rabbit. I watched it with my niece and found it to be a charming family movie. So, when a sequel was announced, I was very interested to see what they would do. This was supposed to be released in the first quarter of 2020, but due to Covid, it like many other movies got delayed over a year!
How to Stream or Download Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway
To check if the movie is already available for stream or for download from Google Play Store, click on the Download button at the end of the review.
The Movie Review
The first thing to note is that most of the team from in front of and behind the camera came back for this series. We still have Rose Byrne and Domnhall Gleeson as the main “human” characters. James Cordon returns as Peter Rabbit alongside talented actors such as Margot Robbie, Hayley Atwell, and Elizabeth Debicki to name just a few.
A strange thing happened with Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway for me. They really started hyping this movie up with a ton of ads on the various kid’s TV channels. The thing is, the trailer they decided to use showed this scene with Domnhall Gleeson’s Thomas McGregor rolling down a grassy hill and it is some of the worst CG that I have ever seen, yet they deemed this good enough to promote their movie!
The plot of the movie has Bea continuing to work on her book series about Peter, his wild antics, and the other animals on the farm. At first, Peter is very happy about this, but he soon learns that he is being portrayed as a trouble maker in the book! He gets rather mad about his and heads off and runs into Barnabas an older street-wise rabbit who claims he knew Peter’s father.
Barnabas takes Peter under his wing and they soon start getting into all kinds of trouble. It is at this point where the movie splits in two different directions and we have two main plots running at the same time. One part has Peter and co in what is pretty much a heist movie where they are planning a raid on the farmers market.
This heist part of Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway I think had a lot of promise, but even for a kid’s movie what happens is so predictable and you can see it coming a mile away. The other part of the movie is focused on the human characters where Bea is trying to sell her books, but she is also trying to keep the integrity of it and not have it.
This part of the movie made no sense to me at all. I get Bea wanting to keep a certain level of control over her work, but it just feels so forced and tacked on. It was like they needed something for the main human cast to do and this was the best that they could come up with at short notice.
I have to be honest and say that Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway is nowhere near as much fun as the first movie. Look, at the end of the day this is a movie for kids, but the character development Peter had in the first is tossed out of the window here. The other main plot revolving around Bea and her work is not interesting at all. In general, it feels like a movie that was quickly put together to strike while the first one was still relatively hot.
