Win­nie-the-Pooh: Blood and Hon­ey 2 review – wit­less nonsense

So much great art is the result of a 75-year-in-the-mak­ing IP raid in which the bud­ding artist dips and dives through var­i­ous copy­right loop­holes and cre­ates their mas­ter­piece on the shoul­ders of some for­got­ten clas­sic open for plunder.

No, look, sor­ry Rhys Frake-Water­field, no, no, no, no, no. Just because you got a bit more bud­get this time around, just because they sent you an extra vat of latex gloop, just because you were allowed a extra few hours on Quan­tel Paint­box to spit-shine the crum­my dig­i­tal VFX, doesn’t make Win­nie-the-Pooh: Blood and Hon­ey II any­thing more than the heinous, cack-hand­ed brand cash-in that it is.

For those who didn’t get the memo the first time around, here’s the pitch: imag­ine Win­nie-the-Pooh was basi­cal­ly Leather­face and he loped around the 100 Acre Wood in hill­bil­ly dun­ga­rees and just butchered any­one in his path. And that’s it. That’s the gag. And that is all that hap­pens in this dis­mal sequel, in which Pooh and pals engage in a string of hero­ical­ly unimag­i­na­tive kills, dis­patch­ing gar­ish one-dimen­sion­al flesh­pods whose only role is to be on the busi­ness end of what­ev­er blunt instru­ment is hurtling towards their cranium.

Direc­tor Frake-Water­field attempts to pass off his cheap­jack mode as self-con­scious kitsch, with a few lines of dia­logue which may as well have been spo­ken while the actor winks towards the lens. But wit­less non­sense is still wit­less non­sense when it’s in quote marks, and fol­low­ing a strange­ly detailed set-up, the film lurch­es into a sec­ond half in which the kill count ris­es expo­nen­tial­ly, along­side the feel­ing of skull-com­pound­ing boredom.

If the film is basi­cal­ly a gore pan­to, then its Wid­ow Twanky is played by none oth­er than racon­teur and schol­ar Simon Cal­low, who deliv­ers the film’s sole redeem­ing fea­ture by doing a very OTT Scot­tish accent. Yet faith is lost almost imme­di­ate­ly as he wangs on through what feels like a ten minute mono­logue that not even a mae­stro like Cal­low can sus­tain, and it becomes very clear that we’re watch­ing a bit of expo­si­tion­al padding so there’s enough scratch in the cof­fers for the final chain­saw-based blow-out.

Maybe it seems unfair to be so down on a film that’s bring­ing a lit­tle more pre­ci­sion and finesse to the screen than the exe­crable, ama­teur hour orig­i­nal from 2023. Yet the issue here is noth­ing to do with the exe­cu­tion, and every­thing to do with the ethics of mak­ing such a film. What’s so galling is that Frake-Water­field and his writer Matt Leslie do absolute­ly noth­ing with the IP beyond steal the char­ac­ters and the set­ting. They’re hap­py to have the name recog­ni­tion and a nice lit­tle hook to get some tabloid col­umn inch­es, but scrape away all the con­text and you’re left with the most gener­ic slash­er movie imag­in­able. There’s so lit­tle recourse to hun­ny in this film that you won­der if they even both­ered to read Milne’s won­der­ful books?

This is already being described as the sec­ond part of a pro­posed TCU (Twist­ed Child Uni­verse), with a Peter Pan rip-off film en route. Yet this whole con­cept is a form of grave-piss­ing, so wan­ton­ly low­brow that it can’t even oper­ate as par­o­dy. So yes, in case it hasn’t come across blunt­ly enough thus far, this is a ghast­ly bit of business.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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