Taika Waititi's improbable coming-of-age comedy, set in Nazi Germany, exhibits all his charm and humanism, but little of his comic genius.
This kind of comedy sits uneasily next to the film's fuzzy sentimentality, not to mention the intermittent appearance of genuinely horrific imagery — like resistance fighters hanging from the gallows — that the film can't quite reconcile with its good-natured, childlike vision.
Waititi's films have historically prized dorky, rambling humanism over cutthroat comedy, which is surely one of the reasons he's so beloved — but here, it's precisely because he's so amiable that he seems unable, or at least unwilling, to deliver the death punch to the subjects of his satire. The film's kiss-off line to the Führer — one of the most ineffectual scenes in any film this year — embodies the film's overriding issues; though again, it's not out of character for Waititi's previous work.
By the time Jojo Rabbit resorts to tying things up with David Bowie's Heroes — lest anyone forget, a nihilistic song about the impermanence of existence, delivered by an alcoholic narrator — it's clear that this is history cheerfully devoid of too much heavy context, a feelgood summer movie that the whole family can enjoy without asking too many questions.Jojo Rabbit is in cinemas from December 26.
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