‘Jojo Rabbit’ or — Nodding Off With Nazis ?

So I fell asleep during ‘Jojo Rabbit’!

Seriously, I fell asleep and I never fall asleep during movies yet I nodded off during this comedy about Nazis, a subject matter I thought that, at the very least, would keep me awake. But no, I dropped off for about 45 seconds and got those time dilations/how-much-time-has-passed-by? shit going on. I think it was just before Stephen Merchant popped up for a highly original turn as a Gestapo officer. I heard many things about ‘Jojo Rabbit’ (2019) but nobody had warned me it was so dull and unfunny.

It’s not even that controversial; it’s just not subtle and to the point it makes ‘Allo’ Allo’’ look like ‘Shoah’. Hey, if this movie is going to make cheap gags then so am I. And trust me, this film is stuffed with cheap gags. There’s a joke about German shepherds that aren’t dogs but, and you’ll bust a gut at this cracker, are ACTUAL shepherds! Mein sides are splitting! Oh, and the dialogue has to be delivered in a cod-parody of a Germanic accent because it’s not as if laughing at the way Germans speak didn’t go out of fashion in the late 1970’s or anything. Am I feeling that it’s the Nazi’s that are getting persecuted as stereotypes here and feeling sorry for THEM in this movie? Is this the effect the film is going for?

Also, is Jojo himself meant to be such an insufferable prick? I’m not kidding, I hated this little, self-entitled asshole. I couldn’t stand him for exactly the same reasons I can’t stand Ferris Bueller so imagine my agony watching a film with Ferris Bueller in it AND he’s a Nazi. And I didn’t think there was a way to make that character more annoying but Waititi, staggeringly, seems to have achieved the impossible and the unthinkable. What does Jojo actually do in this movie? What’s his arc? What does he learn? He doesn’t voluntarily renounce Nazism at the end, only because Germany is fucked and he has no alternatives. And we’re meant to be rooting for him? I was keeping my struggling eyelids open simply because I hoping he’d get run over by a tank. The only message I took away from the movie was that ten year old kids are more annoying than Nazis and, again, I’m not sure that’s the message the movie is going for.

This is the second film I’ve seen this week about one of the major world wars and it’s the second one to make me care about either of those conflicts less than when I went in: ‘1917’ is nothing more than a fairground ride, essentially doing for the WW I trenches what Sandra Bullock and ‘Gravity’ did for space whilst ‘Jojo Rabbit’ made me realise “Well, the second World War wasn’t all in vain because at least we got some Hitler jokes out of it”. And there’s no danger of the ‘Let’s play Hitler and the Nazis as funny’ joke wearing off quickly here because it isn’t funny from the get-go as well as turning the entire movie into a one-joke film.

That was the big problem for me with this movie; it had nothing to do with political sensitivity or portraying Nazis for laughs or any of that stuff. It was simply that I didn’t laugh once during the movie, that I found the film so laugh-free that I started falling asleep. It was only when I got home that I realised I had laughed more (well, once to be precise) during this year’s ‘Only An Excuse’. I’m not kidding, and if you’d told me beforehand that Jonathan Watson would make me laugh more than Taika Waititi I’d have thought you were out of your fucking head. So don’t say I never praise BBC Scotland’s comedy output because I did just there, albeit it needed to have Nazis in the comparison to work.

I like Taika Waititi. I loved ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ (2014), I enjoyed ‘Thor; Ragnarok’ (2017) and quite liked ‘Hunt For The Wilderpeople’ (2016) yet from my reaction to ‘Jojo Rabbit’ I’m worried that I’m starting to find Watititi’s style of comedy exhausting. Maybe that’s why I fell asleep. I was paying attention to the movie and I remember having some vague thoughts about Emir Kusturica’s ‘Underground’ (1995) towards the end and how that was a better movie plus thinking Waititi’s direction was somewhat insipid as well as the fact that I had actually laughed more during ‘Schindler’s List’ (Ben Kingsley has a couple of nice lines) than I did during this.

What can I say? I just didn’t like ‘Jojo Rabbit’. I tell you who would’ve liked it though and that’s Hitler himself. Think about it: he was a frustrated artist after all so I think knowing he’d go on to have such an impact on popular culture in the 21st Century would’ve appealed to him more than invading Poland.