Picking up a couple of years after the last film, the sequel finds Thomas McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson) fully adapted to life on the farm and happily married to aspiring children's author/thinly veiled Beatrix Potter surrogate Bea (Rose Byrne). However, he still has a frosty relationship with the animals who once terrorized him — in particular, their ringleader Peter Rabbit (James Corden), who he still accuses of stealing food even as he's trying to get all the other creatures to follow the rules of the farm. Things start changing for the better when Bea's self-published children's book about the rabbits becomes a bestseller, attracting the attention of hotshot publisher Nigel Basil-Jones (David Oyelowo).
He loves the story, but in typical corporate fashion, demands the entire thing be changed so the rabbits are having more adventures in space and at sea, not just on a farm. And his biggest change is to reimagine Peter as more than just a mischievous spirit, but as the "bad seed," the villain he so clearly is. This gives Peter a crisis; he's finally up on billboards and getting attention for the first time, but as a mischievous character he doesn't want to be. So he runs away from his farmyard pals and meets the street rabbit Barnabas ("Fear The Walking Dead" star Lennie James), who enrolls him in criminal schemes, telling Peter to embrace his more mischievous side.
Most of the film's inspired comic material is the meta book publisher storyline that will likely go over the heads of younger viewers — however, inspired ideas on paper don't necessarily ensure funny results in action. This meta plot does eventually pay off in a knowingly silly grand finale where the vast majority of Nigel's recommended storylines for future rabbit adventures in Bea's books, from boat and ski chases to skydiving, all come to fruition in an increasingly ridiculous montage of the farmyard gang reuniting after getting split up. But this is the sole time when the meta jokes are more adventurous than characters breaking the fourth wall to point out the gag to the audience. At one point, a character cracks wise about the books being adapted into a film by a Hollywood director who doesn't understand the material, punctuated by a painfully unfunny shot of another character staring blankly at the audience like an "Office" reaction GIF.
Elsewhere, a reference to a "flashlight" has Peter Rabbit insisting the word "torch" be used so British viewers can understand it — a joke that might work on paper, but largely caused confusion at my screening, where a nearby child loudly asked if that meant the rabbits were all American. If this is a commentary on British pop culture being adapted by Hollywood filmmakers who don't understand it, then it's a clear failure: it looks every bit like the soulless corporate product it is criticizing, the self-awareness doing very little to hide the screenwriting laziness.
