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Bunny and the Bull
Stars: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Véronica Echegui, Sylvia Syms
Director: Paul King
This fantasy-comedy journey into the surreal is ingenuous, inventive and unfortunately boring as well. And the extreme crassness of the material works against the fantasy format.
Against a stop-motion, papier-mâché background, nerdy Stephen (Hogg), agoraphobic to the extent that he hasn't left his flat for a year, and piles (and files) the detritus of his life into cardboard boxes, remembers the series of events that led up to his plight - a journey across Europe (funded by a win on the ponies) with his friend Bunny (Farnaby), a curly-haired hedonist who has turned coarseness into a fine art.
Picking up a Spanish girl (Echegui) in a Polish fast-food joint, they head for her home town (where Bunny intends to fight a bull) via a hotel on a mountaintop (hosted by Syms, from whom they steal a stuffed bear), via a Heath Robinson fairground and a giant Russian hobo (in Switzerland?), who wants the bear in exchange for letting the hapless Bunny sleep with one of his dogs.
Much ribaldry follows, although everything that happens here does so extremely slowly, so that the film, as well as inducing tedium, gets to feeling extremely long. Echegui is a looker in the Penélope Cruz mould, but can't act half as well, while Hogg and Farnaby do what they can with the dialogue exhanges on offer.
David Quinlan
USA 2009. UK Distributor: Optimum. Colour.
100 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.
Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.
Review date: 22 Nov 2009