Movie Review: “The House Bunny”
Kat Dennings, Anna Faris, Katherine McPhee, Emma Stone and Rumer Willis in “The House Bunny.”
Rating: 56
“The House Bunny” is a proudly featherweight comedy that might have been completely intolerable, but this farce from the writing team behind “Legally Blonde” could be the vehicle that finally gives Anna Faris the Hollywood career she deserves. It could do for Faris what “Legally Blonde” did for Reece Witherspoon — providing a rung in her ladder to better things.
Faris plays Shelley Darlingson, an irrepressibly bubbly Playboy Bunny who went straight from a childhood in an orphanage to being the most popular girl in Hugh Hefner’s harem. She lives the good life in Hef’s mansion, dreaming of being picked to be the next centerfold, but the morning after her 27th birthday party, she receives a terse letter: she must move out immediately.
Shelley has no prospects and falls on hard times from the beginning, but after overhearing a conversation between three sorority sisters that sounded suspiciously like the repartee she enjoyed at Hef’s Grotto, she weasels her way into a job as house mother for the Zeta House. Naturally, the Zetas are the worst sorority on campus, packed with social misfits and facing extinction if they cannot ramp up their membership.
Thankfully, Shelley knows something about being aggressively social, and she helps the girls (led by Emma Stone, Rumer Willis, Kat Dennings and former “American Idol” runner-up Katherine McPhee) readjust their outlook and … presentation. But she must do so while fighting off a top sorority scheming to get the Zetas ousted for good so it can take over their house.
That list of actresses as misfits is a dead giveaway: “The House Bunny” suffers from “She’s All That” syndrome — they are all clearly beautiful under all that geek garb. The male love interests — Colin Hanks for Faris and the All-American Rejects’ Tyson Ritter for Stone — have fairly thankless jobs as sturdy but bland objects, but turnabout is fair play. And Hefner delivers one of the worst performances of the year — as himself. It’s as if director Fred Wolf tried his best to coax a performance out of the man and simply gave up.
But this is Faris’ show, and she’s pretty wonderful — a Goldie Hawn for the 21st century. Faris came to most people’s notice in the “Scary Movie” films, but it was her amazing cameo, widely believed to be a Cameron Diaz impersonation, in “Lost in Translation” that really proved her value as a comedic talent. “The House Bunny” is slight, fizzy and almost too dumb for its own good, but if Faris benefits, it has done its job.
— George Lang
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*Reese Witherspoon