The Nut Job
Written by: Sam Henry Miller
I came to a portentous epiphany while watching The Nut Job. Slouching deeper into my seat, engulfed by a horde of over-privileged adolescents—between the four tweens to my six going Liu Kang on my seat-back, the twenty sucrose-mongering tykes and their gift-bag potluck over my lap (presumably post-party), and the 8-year-old three rows down snagging high scores on his Blackberry—I realized that the film, the bright movey thing at the front that no one was paying attention to, was worse.
The Nut Job is kiddie porn. Hold on, I can explain. The Chucky Cheese-esque, skeeball n’ pizza greased frenzy of a theatrical monstrosity in front of “the fourth wall”, I came to realize, was simply a reflection of the quality of material behind it. Like porn, the goofy, flamboyantly-hued CGI critters, 3D gimmickology, lazy writing, and precisely timed fart jokes (perhaps the “money shot” of G-rated porn) serve and suffice for a swift, five-year-old’s-funny-bone wank. In other words, one could argue, The Nut Job was made for consumption, rather than experience—not a film, per se, but a product to complement the lunacy of a kiddie-birthday gathering, or the time you didn’t spend planning what do when you’d regain custody of the kids this weekend, or, most practically, a boon to the fruition of concession sales.
The plot seems to follow the premise of a guy maple-glazed on THC who one day thought, “Hey, you know how Caper films always attribute animal names to their thieves? What if we, like, un-metaphored them?” Unfortunately, not even Will Arnett’s comedic genius nor Liam Neeson’s puberty-inducing voice could salvage any substance from the subsequent stupidity. The pacing, the dialogue, the set-ups/pay-offs, even the action (what CGI should rightfully excel at) is all out of tune. How could a film so faithfully formulaic not at the least achieve mediocrity in this regard?
Well, because it’s kiddie porn. See, now I don’t sound like such a creep. But this still makes me sad…
Because I recall a time when a G or PG-rated, CGI-film was not considered a children’s film but a family film. Generally speaking, since the time and effort it took to computer generate was vastly more complex, nuanced, and tedious than it is today, animators and creators offered concepts as ridiculous as a ‘nut heist’ but took the time to right the writing. What this yielded, for the most part, were enjoyable films for all ages, because instead of insisting on their forms (3D, CGI, spectacle in general), they relied on their content for value.
But animated films seem to have lost this magic. They’re not about quality as art anymore, but rather lucrative utility as products. DreamWorks and Pixar (the two giants in this regard) still seem to strive towards this noble end but even yet fall prey to the 3D, flatulent failsafe every once in a while.
I supposed if there’s a lesson to glean from experiencing The Nut Job, it would be: never see a movie on a Saturday, with Brendan Fraser, and animals, unless you’re fixing to step in skittle-peppered, slushy-vomit. And perhaps one more: in Capitalism, everyone wins, except art, which finds itself more and more pitifully prefixed with an F.