The House Bunny

By Scott Tobias | August 21, 2008 | 9:20pm

Film Reviews Film

Can someone please fire
Anna Faris' agent? How much longer does one of this generation's most gifted
comediennes—an ebullient ditz in the tradition of Judy Holliday, Lucille
Ball, and Goldie Hawn—have to be the best thing about a terrible movie?
Other than the barely circulated stoner comedy Smiley Face and her minor turns in Brokeback
Mountain and Lost In Translation, Faris has mostly logged time in dire vehicles like The
House Bunny,
which are dumb-dumb to her smart-dumb. As usual, Faris makes the most of what
she's given, here playing a real-life Barbie doll who acts like she was just
recently animated, like a skanky Pinocchio discovering the world for the first
time. It's a shame her inspired creation gets ground through an insipid
'80s-style campus comedy with a tarted-up Pussycat Dolls gloss—but then,
that's pretty much Faris' career in a nutshell.

With a kind of deranged
bubbliness, Faris stars as a Playboy Bunny who's just turning 27, which she's told is
"like 59 in Bunny years." Her advanced age gets her kicked out of the Playboy
Mansion, leaving her homeless and astray in a beat-up station wagon. She gets a
new purpose and a place to stay†via a job as "house mother" for the Zeta
sorority, a collection of campus pariahs in danger of losing their charter if
they don't get 30 pledges. Faris convinces the girls to get makeovers and be
more social, but they're reluctant to take advice from a woman who takes the
word "vapid" as a compliment. Meanwhile, Faris has to undergo an intellectual
makeover in order to appeal to a sweet, do-gooder type played by Colin Hanks.

The House Bunny is the ultimate example
of the cliché where a dowdy young woman just needs to take off her glasses (or
her back brace) and let down her hair to turn into a beautiful swan. But that's
just one of a host of musty old tropes peddled by the movie, which is what Legally
Blonde
might have looked like had it been made in the Revenge Of The Nerds era. In spite of the talented
supporting cast (Superbad's Emma Stone, Beverly D'Angelo, Christopher
McDonald), 100 percent of the laughs come courtesy of Faris, who's particularly
good in the early going, when her babe-in-the-woods act reaches Homer
Simpson-like heights of comic obliviousness. As usual, the movie eventually
lets her down.

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