Movie Review The Nut Job 2 Nutty By Nature

The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature (2017)

Directed by Cal Brunker

Written by Cal Brunker, Scott Bindley, Bob Barlen

Starring Will Arnett, Maya Rudolf, Jackie Chan, Katherine Heigl 

Release Date August 11th, 2017 

To call out The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature for creative bankruptcy would be as futile as calling out Congress for its corruption. Sure, both of those assessments are of equal accuracy but they are also empty facts of life that aren’t going to change simply because we point them out. So, what then do we make of The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature? Now that we’ve accepted the creative bankruptcy what is left for us to ponder?

The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, picks up where 2014’s The Nut Job left off with Surly Squirrel (Will Arnett) and his woodland pals living the high life in their adopted home inside a nut shop. The gravy train of free nuts seems endless but Surly’s gal-pal Andie (Katherine Heigl) remains worried. Andie wants everyone to get out of the nut shop and go forage in the park just in case something ever happens to their gravy train. Her concerns are laughed off until something does happen and the nut shop explodes, thankfully with our characters on the outside.

Left homeless and without a food source, Surly leads his crew back into the park only to find that the town’s corrupt Mayor (Bobby Moynihan), who literally has the phrase EmBzzler as his license plate, is demolishing the park in favor of an amusement park filled with garish, overpriced and highly unsafe rides; because apparently demolishing the park isn’t enough, kids need to know that the Mayor is getting kickbacks for his unsafe choices. Hey, what kid doesn’t love plots about corrupt politicians?

Naturally, the animal pals look to Surly for a plan and he’s got a whopper, a literal war with the machines that are tearing up the park. This leads to an action scene in which the animals battle bulldozers and earth-movers and cause as much damage to the park as the bulldozers and earth-movers were doing without the aid of the animals attempting to destroy them. When our furry friends are thwarted in their efforts they must find a new home or find another way to fight back that doesn’t get them all killed.

In case the plot description didn’t grab you don’t worry because The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature has a brand-new character that is guaranteed to go right for your wallet. Jackie Chan provides the voice of Mr. Feng, a cute little mouse who was once a forest dweller but was driven to the city by the same corrupt Mayor now taking away Surly’s home. Mr. Feng’s schtick is that though he and his fellow mice are adorable they cannot stand being called cute and when they are called cute they react with violence.

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Disenchanted

Disenchanted (2022) 

Directed by Adam Shankman 

Written by Brigitte Hales, J. David Stern 

Starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Maya Rudolph 

Release Date November 18th, 2022 

Published November 17th, 2022 

Disney Plus 

I'm growing concerned that Disney has somehow found an algorithm that determines the exact level of mediocre. Look at their recent spate of live action movies and you can see what I am getting at. From Jungle Cruise to Hocus Pocus 2, Disney has been able to craft movies so inoffensive, bland, mediocre and passably 'entertaining' that they simply pass through you like a fast food meal, not bad, but not exactly a memorable meal. 

Further evidence of this algorithmic mediocrity comes in their latest Disney Plus release, a sequel to the wonderful 2007 comedy, Enchanted, called Disenchanted. Bland, mediocre, passable, each of these benign phrases are perfectly fitting of this deeply run of the mill effort. Directed by a master of bland, middle of the road, mainstream mush, Adam Shankman, Disenchanted is not a bad movie, just a supremely bland, deeply unmemorable movie that fails to justify its existence. 

Where Enchanted was wildly inventive, a loving tribute to Disney Princess tropes, Disenchanted sends up fairy tale tropes with all the skill of someone taking up juggling for the first time. Using Disney created tropes from Cinderella, Snow White, Maleficent and any number of classic fairy tales, Disenchanted appears to have been made by people whose idea of satire is aiming a fire hose of every idea without hitting any specific target. 

Disenchanted picks up the story of former fairy tale Princess, Gisele (Amy Adams), living her happily ever after in New York City. It's been 10 years since she fell through a portal into the real world and met and fell in love with her handsome Prince, New York lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey). However, things are not the as Happy as the phrase Happily Ever After implies. Gisele has grown weary of the big city and her relationship with her adoptive daughter, Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino) has grown strained. Morgan has become a movie teenager, a bland amalgamation of sarcasm and unfocused rebellion. 

In order to get her Happily Ever After back on track, Gisele asks Robert to move the family to the suburbs, specifically, a tiny hamlet called Monroeville. There, they buy what appears to be a run down former castle and set about a new ending for their story. Things do not go well and with everyone in the family at each other's throat, Gisele grows desperate for a magical fix to her problems. That magic arrives with a visit from her friends, Prince Edward (James Marsden) and his wife, Nancy (Idina Menzel). 

Visiting from Gisele's animated home world, Andalasia, they've brought a gift, a magic wand, to be given to Gisele and Robert's baby daughter. Once they leave however, Gisele decides to use the wand for herself. She wishes for her new home to be just like Andalasia and the next day, it's a full on fairy tale. Robert is now an adventurer, Morgan has become a Cinderella like figure, and, since Gisele is technically Morgan's stepmother, she begins to turn evil. A helpful scroll informs Gisele and us that if she doesn't reverse the wish by Midnight she will turn evil and all of Monroeville will remain in this fairy tale world. Oh, and that means destroying Andalasia for some reason. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.media

Movie Review The Happytime Murders

The Happytime Murders (2018) 

Directed by Brian Henson 

Written by Todd Berger 

Starring Melissa McCarthy, Joel McHale, Maya Rudolph, Elizabeth Banks 

Release Date April 24th, 2018 

Published April 23rd, 2018 

A number of critics have called The Happytime Murders the ‘worst movie of 2018.’ These critics apparently forgot about 15:17 to Paris or The Maze Runner Death Cure. The Happytime Murders is undoubtedly bad, I completely agree with that sentiment; but not worst of the year level bad. Mostly, the film is a failure of a central idea, that idea being that puppets acting like raunchy, obnoxious humans is funny just because they are puppets.

Melissa McCarthy stars in The Happytime Murders as Detective Connie Edwards, the former partner of the first ever puppet police detective, Phil Phillips (voiced by Bill Barretta). Edwards and Phillips, now a private detective, are thrown back together when a series of murders involving the cast of a popular puppet television show comes to center on Phil as a possible suspect, one of the victims was Phil’s own brother.

Phil somehow winds up at the scene of each murder and though we know he’s not the killer, it’s no surprise that he becomes a wanted man. The plot then turns on whether he and his former partner can put aside their past and work to clear his name and solve the horrific series of murders. It’s a rather straight-forward plot and if it starred human actors instead of puppets you might have a hard time seeing Happytime Murders as a comedy.

Director Brian Henson, the son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, hasn’t had much experience directing feature films and his inexperience shows in how clumsy the approach to tone is in The Happytime Murders. Dark comedy is tricky and if you can’t get the tone just right your film will fail and Henson never finds the right vibe for this movie. Everything is far too serious and straightforward and the plot relies far too heavily on the idea that puppets are inherently funny.

Henson appears to believe that seeing a puppet act in a human fashion, especially an obnoxious or raunchy fashion, is funny regardless of the context and for me that was not the case. I found parts of The Happytime Murders downright bleak with one dark comic gag falling short after another. The film relies heavily on cop movie clichés but doesn’t do anything to deconstruct those clichés other than embody them with puppets.

Melissa McCarthy has the only good moments in The Happytime Murders. McCarthy’s Connie has a very funny Jerry Maguire moment when she thinks she's been fired from her job and delivers an unhinged monologue on her way out the door. Beyond that however, and an occasional funny line late in the movie, even McCarthy appears to take the material of The Happytime murders a little too seriously, or, at least, serious enough that the comedy fails to land.

Puppets doing human things just isn’t funny on its own. Comedy requires context and structure and timing and The Happytime Murders has little context, only modest structure and the puppets make timing jokes for the human characters difficult. Melissa McCarthy is an actress whose timing is impeccable in most of her movies but she’s off throughout The Happytime Murders because she’s stuck trying to bounce off of non-human characters who can’t react to her usually effective wordplay.

If it sounds like I hated The Happytime Murders let me assure you that I don’t hate it. I just don’t think it is very good. The film is far more forgettable than it is offensive. The badness comes not from a lack of effort, there is a clear amount of effort on display from the remarkable puppeteers who make the puppet characters feel alive. Rather, it’s the kind of badness that likely only came around as the film was being cut together and the filmmakers slowly realized they hadn’t written any good jokes, just a series of dramatic, clichéd, contexts that are only funny if you think puppets are funny regardless of context or character.

An example: is it funny that Melissa McCarthy encounters a puppet junkie? The puppet is a drug addicted former TV star. The character doesn’t have much to do, doesn’t do much in the way of jokes, aside from a shot or two at McCarthy’s appearance, and then he’s dead. Is it funny that this comes from a puppet? For me, the answer is no, I need the character to actually be funny, to do or to say something funny.

That said, if you find puppets always funny regardless of the context or content, then perhaps this movie is for you.