Blu-ray Review: The Nut Job (2014)

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What a difference a film’s length can make as we learn in director Peter Lepeniotis’s overlong (even at 86 minutes) feature length adaptation of his briskly paced 2005 roughly 10 minute animated short Surly Squirrel.

In The Nut Job Lepeniotis transfers the same unique premise which finds the aptly named, quick-thinking yet self-serving and quick to con squirrel Surly (Will Arnett) in the midst of a real live human bank robbery while planning the perfect heist in his eternal quest for food.

Whereas the short film kept its sights small, the feature length Universal Picture borrows the oft-utilized caper set-up derived from the classic Italian comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (that’s been repurposed in dozens of pictures since) as Surly plots to steal the inventory of a nut store without realizing that the shop is a cover for crooks trying to tunnel into the nearby bank.

Simultaneously casing the job while also recruiting new allies to his side such as the crooks’ tough-looking but softhearted Pit bull (voiced by Maya Rudolph) Arnett’s Surly even finds himself working alongside his old forest friends who’d banished him from the park after being burned one too many times by the selfish squirrel.

Desperate for food to feed the entire park, Katherine Heigl’s brainy Andie is cautious about her new partnership from the start but finds her alliance tested even more when Surly and his sources discover that the real reason the park is having a food shortage is due to a furry friend that Andie’s trusted her entire life.

While there are some dynamic action sequences that are brought vividly to life in the warm-toned visually stunning CG animation from former Toy Story 2 animator turned director Lepeniotis (including an inventive opener and an interesting chase that uses birds as parachutes), compared to the overwhelming dull stretches, the diversions are few and far between.

Bogged down by a hero you can’t really root for until he inevitably and rather abruptly sees the error of his ways by the end, you can’t help but wonder how much better the film would’ve been if say, Andie had been bumped to the lead role and Surly had been turned into a supporting player.

For while Surly was ideal in a 10 minute classic Looney Tunes inspired production, he isn’t the best main character to build an entire plotline around. However, to be fair, Nut’s pretty unbalanced in the way it seasons its cast of characters as far too often the film relies on bodily function sidekick humor for cheap laughs rather than serving up solid roles.

One bright light in this lackluster Job is unexpected MVP Brendan Fraser’s spirited vocal performance as a dimwitted wannabe hero Grayson whose knack for failing his missions is nearly equal to the size of his own ego.

Completely wasting the talented Arnett on a character who loses his spunky personality in favor of a redemptive formulaic paradigm that rings false by coming completely out of left field (as never once were we led to believe earlier on that Surly even wanted to change), The Nut Job is a missed opportunity on a number of levels.

All in all, it’s a vital reminder that there is still a worthwhile market for high caliber short films as perhaps Surly would’ve entertained us better as part of an anthology film that introduced us to all the characters in a series of shorts that were each as unique and inventive as the filmmaker’s 2005 introduction to the squirrel.

While younger children may be more forgiving than older ones despite lulls that may make them restless in the film’s running time that feels nearly double its length, hopefully by stepping back to watch this full-bodied roast side-by-side with the shorter serving, the filmmakers will be able to reevaluate exactly where they went right and wrong while whipping up this batch for the big screen.

Though admittedly blandly appetizing, here’s to hoping that the next Nut they make will follow a less familiar recipe in order to deliver something to the audience that’s not only much more flavorful but filled with greater opportunities for its talented cast to crack us up in Universal's upcoming sequel to this forgettable first Job. 

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Idiocracy

Director:
Mike Judge

Most of the time, I criticize the validity and artistic morals of test screenings that often send nervous studios and directors scrambling to call their actors back to reshoot new material and delete possibly objectionable scenes in order to try and please everyone. While film indeed is a collaborative medium, I’m not sure that rounding up participants from a mall parking lot and screening a movie they may have very little interest in, only to force them to rate each and every aspect of it is the right way to decide what works and what doesn’t. I am a frequent attendee at advanced screenings but seldom participate in test audience events because art shouldn’t be that much of a democracy and we’re forgetting that people spend years developing what’s onscreen for us to pass judgment on within minutes (or sometimes seconds).

However, in the case of Idiocracy which had according to IMDb “disastrous” test screenings, the reaction was sadly warranted and sent Fox Studios into retreat, hiding the reels for more than one year before quietly dumping it into just six markets with very little advertising.

The film had all the promise of a hit—a wonderfully creative premise, hot star Luke Wilson, and being helmed by director Mike Judge of Office Space fame but somewhere along the way they opted entirely for crass over class, lewd over shrewd, and ended up with a movie one can only describe as ugly. It shouldn’t have been this way and in retrospect, I still admire the ingenious set-up which finds under-achieving and statistically average army librarian Luke Wilson, along with prostitute Maya Rudolph being selected for a year-long experiment that would cause the two participants to sleep for an entire year to hopefully save their brightest down the road for them to be all they can be.

The experiment goes off without a hitch although warning flags are raised when the doctor becomes much too fascinated with the pimp lifestyle discovered when recruiting Rudolph and after he’s arrested and the base is forced to close, Wilson and Rudolph are forgotten about for five hundred years. They awaken to discover that the progressive dumbing down of America weaned on video games, sports drinks, that favors brawn over brains has made the country run rampant with idiots unable to speak coherently and prefer instead to sit on lazy boys which double as toilets while watching shows that consist entirely of guys getting hit in the crotch with a variety of implements for laughs.

Although intellectuals and academics have been speculating on the nightly news and in publications that we’re headed in the wrong direction with our fast food styled entertainment and life of convenience over substance, once we actually see this life produced onscreen, we realize that it’s so disgusting, it’s not one we’d like to spend even five minutes in let alone the entire running time of a feature film.

Idiocracy would have made a hilarious short film or an even superior story, although it does beg to mind the question that perhaps Judge’s fans, already preferring visuals to the written word, may never have read it in the first place, thus making his point without their intention.