Francesco Quario’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Morality is a question of wacky accents"
Let's get this straight: I would have found Jojo Rabbit painfully dull and unfunny even without the touchy subject matter. I seem to have a problem with Taika Waititi, his humour just doesn't click with me. I did not enjoy What We Do in the Shadows nearly as much as the majority of the internet seems to have. I found that the humour in both films, while largely absent from the script, relies instead on the characters speaking with peculiar accents. However, if in Shadows the accent in question is the actors' natural New Zealander, here it's an annoyingly fake German whose effect and consistency fluctuate among performances.
But obviously we can't stop there because, apart from being dull and unfunny, Jojo Rabbit does also deal with a touchy subject matter. Nazi Germany is a famously difficult topic to joke about or satirise. Charlie Chaplin did it with a veil of seriousness, Mel Brooks somehow pulled it off without any of the sorts. Roberto Benigni exploited it for cheap melodrama, Taika Waititi exploited it for cheap laughs. And it's more Green Book than Life is Beautiful, in that it's more ignorant than downright offensive.
It perpetuates the tired old story often found in neoliberal media that wants you to blame the individual, not the system. What is it with Sam Rockwell and playing horrible dudes that we are meant to sympathise with over one minor good action motivated by script convenience? And of course, look at how silly those nazis are. What kind of crazy, fanatic place would allow such improbable figures to gain power? Certainly not the US, they are the ones who liberate Germany in the end! (Of course, it's always the US in these movies, never the USSR).
So, this is not the first crowd-pleaser to make these mistakes and it certainly won't be the last. However, unlike Benigni's abomination, Jojo Rabbit has the decency to stay outside of concentration camps, managing to reach "forgettable" territory without falling into a deeper pit.
I want my rating to stay above half a star for this reason, but also a few others: somehow, SOMEHOW wacky Waititi Hitler got a few chuckles out of me because of how absurd it was; Jojo's friend Yorki was adorable, you can tell that the actor his having the best of fun playing him; it does some (well, maybe one) of the serious scenes quite well, but most of the times it feels cheap and ineffective.
Well, I guess the funniest thing about this was the German version of "I'm a Believer" that they used in the trailer, and even then it makes me laugh mostly because of Shrek memes.