This may be more me than the film but this film is way too hopeful. Humanity isn't innately good.

Rating: 5/10 (24 February 2020)

I think I might like this film a little better if the jokes landed stronger. The humor is never cringe inducing but most of it never arises above dryly amusing. The best joke in the entire film is a dumb pun about German Shepherds and that is a sort of a big problem with the film. Farces like this require the material to be taken nearly on the subtextual level and JoJo Rabbit never properly gets there. The rest of the writing is too loose to be effective.
The film is way too saccharine on the possibility of change for people. JoJo's (character) entire story is a maturation plot mixed with a redemption plot. He stops being a Nazis because he grows up and meets a Jewish girl. The film stacks the deck in his favor to change. He's young. He finds the Jewish girl cute. The plot developments how Nazism treats his family all grease the wheels to get him to change. As far as that goes it's fine. It is keeping with the film's overall style and taken as farce it lands. But the film doesn't stop there.
Much of the problem stems from Captain Klenzendorf. Played by Hollywood's go to for a likable bigot, Sam Rockwell, this character's story needed to be removed or vastly re-written. He is given a fairly similar arch to JoJo. But his arch is truncated to the point it is unbelievable and worse undermines the uniqueness of JoJo's escape from Nazism. When viewed in context this character makes the film too sunny. Most people do not escape their ideological trappings. (There is also a weird queering of Klenzendorf to try to sell the change as he too was a victim of the Nazis but that rises other issues).
The film isn't in bad taste. It just has a blinkered and naive view of human nature.