Review: Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

Not rated

Score: 5 out of 5

Hundreds of Beavers is one of the funniest damn movies I've seen in a long time. A mix of Looney Tunes cartoons, wilderness epics, video games, and old-time silent comedy, it's 108 minutes of non-stop, rapid-fire slapstick with barely any dialogue that gets going in the first five minutes and never lets up until the very end, constantly escalating its jokes into the ridiculous in ways that never failed to put a smile on my face. It's the kind of movie where, at nearly two hours, I should've gotten bored given my distaste for comedies that run overly long, but just as John Wick: Chapter 4 managed to pull off the feat of maintaining non-stop action movie energy for nearly three hours, this movie had me laughing out of my seat constantly. If this movie is playing anywhere near you, be it in theaters or on VOD, you owe it to yourself to seek it out.

The plot is simple. In the rugged forests of 19th century northern North America, applejack maker Jean Kayak loses his farm in a comic mishap and now has to survive in the winter wilderness with his limited wits, whereupon he eventually crosses paths with an army of beavers building... something a bit more elaborate than a dam. The only outpost of civilization for miles around is a fur trading post, where Jean both trades pelts for equipment and sets out to win the heart of the owner's beautiful daughter, who's also the trading post's furrier who skins all the beavers he brings them. From that setup, we get a constantly escalating series of comic mishaps and set pieces as Jean sets out to trap rabbits, beavers, and other woodland critters while they in turn try to outwit him -- not a difficult feat, as it turns out. This is a film that runs on cartoon logic where realism takes a backseat, with holes in the ground serving almost as a portal network in the forest and both Jean and the beavers building increasingly outlandish contraptions to kill each other with. This film doesn't have an MPAA rating, but if I had to give it one, I'd probably give it a PG-13, with some light sex jokes (specifically one involving the trader's daughter) but nothing explicit and all the beaver death presented in an extremely slapstick manner that's more Wile E. Coyote than Red Dead Redemption.

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, the film's co-writer alongside its director Mike Cheslik, plays Jean, and he is an immediately larger-than-life figure, a parody of a 19th-century outdoorsman and hunter-trapper who starts the film cocky and dimwitted and eventually turns into a cackling madman as it goes on. Working entirely without dialogue, he delivers a phenomenal comic performance purely through his expressions as Jean is subjected to every indignity under the sun in his quest. The entire cast understood the assignment, but this was the guy who had to carry the whole film on his shoulders, and after this, I'd happily pay to see him in other films. No less important, however, were the titular beavers, all of them, together with most of the other animals in the film, played by humans in furry animal suits. If Jean is like Wile E. Coyote or Elmer Fudd in live-action, then they're like Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner, their obviously human proportions adding to the sense of these creatures as mischievous little critters who seem to be enjoying the torment they put Jean through. The overall aesthetic of the film, shot in black and white with gleeful disregard for realism in its special effects, not only makes the painful slapstick that Jean is constantly subjected to feel, well, more slapstick even as it touched on some surprisingly dark areas (including the funniest scene of an animal getting skinned you'll ever see), it also creates the feel of watching a live-action video game, specifically a mix of an open-world RPG with Jean's quest and accumulation of gear and a Super Nintendo side-scroller with the fantastical environments he goes through in that quest. This was a longer-than-usual comedy, but it was one that, between its non-stop onslaught of jokes and the constant progression of its story, never got old or felt like it was spinning its wheels.

The Bottom Line

Great comedies are hard for me to review without giving away the best parts, and this was a great one. I expect everyone involved with this movie to get a lot of attention going forward, such was the great time I had watching it. This is probably gonna be on my personal "best of 2024" list when the year is up, and I'm telling you now: go see it.