Get to Know Your Rabbit

A typically worthless early effort from Brian De Palma, Get to Know Your Rabbit follows Tom Smothers’ Donald Beeman, a busy executive, as he decides to quit his job and pursue a career as a tap-dancing magician. It’s worth noting that the movie, before it morphs into a flat-out unwatchable trainwreck, boasts a fair degree of potential in its opening stretch, as De Palma’s decision to infuse a few early sequences with less-than-subtle instances of style sets a decidedly promising tone. (De Palma offers up a couple of seriously impressive single-take shots, including one that transpires above the central character’s head as he traverses his small apartment.) From there, however, Get to Know Your Rabbit increasingly falls prey to precisely the sort of eye-rollingly broad and hopelessly unfunny comedic happenings that defined the director’s first few movies – with scripter Jordan Crittenden suffusing the thin narrative with a series of exasperatingly offbeat situations and supporting characters. The aggressively wacky atmosphere, not surprisingly, grows more and more intolerable as time progresses, and there finally does reach a point at which the viewer is forced to throw their hands up and simply wait De Palma to finish telling a fairly worthless, interminable story – which ultimately cements Get to Know Your Rabbit‘s place as an epic misfire that’s sadly right in line with De Palma’s first few films.

* out of ****