August 24, 2008 -- I went into this film with very minimal expectations and was disappointed even so. While parts of it are funny, most of its jokes either miss their marks or are embarrassingly stupid. The best thing in it is Anna Faris of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” who plays vacuous blonde bombshell Shelley Darlingson, a playboy bunny with a heart of gold and a first grade education. She has a kind of innocence about her. She trusts people and believes that most people are good at heart. Shelley Darlington is a winning character, and there are others in the film, too.

Shelley gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion for being too old at 27. “That's 59 in Bunny Years,” explains an employee at the mansion who escorts her out the door. There is a plot complication about this later in the film. The distraught, homeless bunny sees some sorority girls walking down the street and immediately recognizes kindred spirits. She ends up at the run-down Zeta Alpha Zeta house where she becomes the house mother to a rag tag band of geeks and social misfits. The house is about to lose its charter due to a lack of new pledges. Shelley is convinced she can turn things around at Zeta. She doesn't know much, but she does know how to do sexy makeovers and how to plan killer parties. She soon transforms the Zeta girls into sex goddesses and the house becomes party central, the most popular house on campus.

Shelley also hooks up with a very nice man, a nursing home administrator, Oliver (played by Colin Hanks of “Untraceable”), but she has a tough time landing him because she never learned to be herself with a man. All she knows how to do is tell a man what she thinks he wants to hear. That tactic doesn't work with Oliver. The sorority girls try to help her by giving her a veneer of education, but that is just another form of insincerity which doesn't work with Oliver. Despite Shelley's best efforts, the Zetas still haven't recruited enough new pledges leading up to the deadline. Worse yet, the Zetas are turning into the kind of social snobs that inhabit the competing sororities. Will the Zeta house survive? Will it deserve to? Will Shelley and Oliver become a couple? Will Shelley go back to the Playboy Mansion? Will the audience care? All of these questions, save the last, will be answered as this movie rolls on to its conclusion.

This movie is touted as being the first comedy with a woman in the leading role produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison production company. What has worked well for Sandler in the past doesn't work well in this movie. It needs to be smarter. The basic idea is sound, but the script, by Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, needs a lot more work to raise it up to the level of “Legally Blonde,” earlier written by the same team of Smith and Lutz. There are a lot of similarities between “The House Bunny” and “Legally Blonde,” but Blonde is the smarter, more insightful screenplay of the two. “The House Bunny” is a much broader, dumber comedy, in the Happy Madison mold, without the insight and character development that made “Legally Blonde” a more polished comedy. Anna Faris is very good in the leading role and some of the other characters are appealing, too, including Zeta girl Natalie (played by Emma Stone of “The Rocker,” who looks like Lindsey Lohan). Acting isn't the problem. The problem is the screenplay and direction. This film rates a C.

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Copyright © 2008 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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