Although she's a Playboy Bunny, she's never been selected as a centerfold. But before she can attain her dream, the carefree Shelley is booted from the Mansion. Clueless and homeless, the overly adorned ex-Bunny finds herself at odds with the real world. She possesses plenty of sex appeal but precious few job or social skills. Then she happens into the lives of the awkward members (including Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Katharine McPhee and Rumer Willis) of the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority.
The Zetas stand to lose their house unless they can get new pledges, which appears hopeless due to their lack of polish and feminine wiles (both of which their rivals at Phi Iota Mu have in spades). Enter Shelley, who mentors the Zetas in how to flaunt what they have in order to attract both new pledges and the opposite sex; the Zetas, in turn, try to teach Shelley that what's on the inside is as important to a man as what a woman has on the outside. This could help Shelley find true happiness with the nice guy, retirement home worker Oliver (Colin Hanks), that she's befriended.
As shocking as it might seem, it turns out The House Bunny is actually pretty fun (and funny). A broad comedy (no pun intended), this Fred Wolf-directed movie was scripted by the same team -- Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz -- responsible for Legally Blonde, and the parallels between the two movies are unmistakable. Both are tales of female empowerment couched inside a goofball comedy featuring dizzy blonde leads who may not be quite as superficial or dumb as we'd been led to believe. Well, maybe.
Of course, this wouldn't work unless the lead actress could play it just right and Anna Faris succeeds in doing that. It's not quite a star-making turn -- Faris has been around too long and been in too many well-known projects for that at this point in her career -- but it's a great showcase for her comedic skills as well as her other, uh, impressive assets. Faris makes Shelley vulnerable and ultimately self-aware enough to save the character from being just a parody of a bimbo. There's a lot of heart in The House Bunny and that's due as much to Faris' performance as to the story.
The rest of the cast shines as well, especially Colin Hanks as Shelley's nice guy love interest Oliver. The relationship between Shelley and Oliver has all the requisite beats of the "boy meets girl" formula but they're flipped around. (However, there's a Pygmalion-like dynamic to their relationship where the man helps to class up the woman, which makes one wonder how feminists will view the film.) The actresses playing the Zeta girls are almost uniformly good, save for Rumer Willis who appears awkward and unseasoned in some of her key moments.
Overall, The House Bunny is a sweet and silly underdog story that, for all its groan-inducing bad lines or poorly executed gags, has enough brilliantly subversive moments to make it a fun piece of fluff.
3 out of 5 Stars, 6/10 Score
