Peter Rabbit (2018)

Peter Rabbit arrives carrying the weight of Beatrix Potter's small, perfect books, and Will Gluck's adaptation promptly sets that weight down in the grass and walks away. The plot concerns a garden, a feud, and a romance between a widowed painter named Bea and Thomas McGregor, a Harrods toy executive who inherits his great-uncle's manor. The rabbits are rendered in glossy 3D. The humans are rendered in Sydney. James Corden voices the title character with the enthusiasm of a man handed a microphone and no supervision.

The film's cultural footprint is modest and largely accidental. It offers a Harrods general manager played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, a supporting turn from Ming-Zhu Hii, and a trio of triplet sisters among the rabbits, none of whom are asked to carry thematic freight. Thomas loses a promotion to his boss's lazy nephew, and a wealthy couple is driven off the property by vermin, which amounts to a faint shrug in the direction of nepotism. No romance beyond the heterosexual pair. No engagement with race. No climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent characters. The garden is a garden.

What lingers is the allergy sequence, in which Peter and his family pelt Thomas with blackberries until one lodges in his mouth and an EpiPen becomes necessary. Advocacy groups objected. Sony apologized. It is the rare family comedy that generates a public health controversy and a mild lesson about sharing, and the film carries both with the same bland confidence. Bea forgives, Thomas stays, the rabbits eat within reason. A film about nothing, delivered competently, which is its own kind of achievement.