The plot: After securing a lifetime’s supply of food from
the local Nut Shop, Surly the squirrel (Will Arnett) and his woodland friends
are living a secure but laidback life. However, when the Nut Shop explodes and
the gang are left short of food once again, they come to head-to-head with
Mayor Muldoon (Bobby Moynihan), who plans on turning the local park into an
income-generating amusement park. If Surly and his friends want to keep their
new home in the park, they’ll have to work together in order to stop Muldoon.
Will Arnett continues to be a good fit for the rather
off-putting main character he’s given, but his personality still hasn’t gotten
much further than ‘If it wasn’t for blind luck, I’d have been dead several
times over by now’. Katherine Heigl is still serving as the supposed voice of
reason to Surly’s antics, but between the limp delivery and the fact that her
character has zero dimensions to her (a recurring trend with this entire film,
I assure you), she exists solely to be proven wrong even more so than Surly.
Maya Rudolph actually makes use of her character as the pug
Precious, with her scene opposite Bobby Cannavale as the main villain’s dog
Frankie resulting in some of the rare few decent moments to be found in this
feature. Jackie Chan makes me weep yet again that he’s stuck doing
bargain-bin-level dreck like this, Bobby Moynihan does fine with the
painfully-thin antagonist he’s saddled with, Isabela Moner as his daughter
feels like she’s been snatched out of a completely different (and possibly better)
movie, and Peter Stormare as a psychotic animal control officer isn’t even
one-tenth as gloriously insane as that sounds. Again, a recurring trend with
this whole production.
Speaking of production, there’s an awful lot to be discussed
as far as how technically-dodgy this thing is. Animation studio ToonBox
Entertainment continues their track record from the previous Nut Job film with
some incredibly dodgy-looking CGI. The texture quality itself is passable but…
honestly, I’m not even sure what it is about the visuals that make them this unappealing to look at, but that is
undeniably the effect we get. This isn’t helped by how, in addition to looking
off, it also sounds remarkably off as well. Part of that is down to the voice
acting, which despite the colourful cast list largely fails to register all
that highly, but there’s also the sound mixing at work as well. I honestly
haven’t seen that many animated films on the big screen that are this haphazard with the audio, to the
point where quite a few dialogue scenes are undercut by how the dialogue itself
is literally cut underneath all the sound effects and even the soundtrack. It should be a welcome reprieve from the
incredibly lame puns at work in the script, but I also shouldn’t have to strain
this much to even hear them in the first place.
There’s also how the soundtrack sucks on toast as well, using the classic tune Born To Be Wild in a way
that is both painfully obvious in terms of choice as well as being played in
its entirety on more than one occasion to make the original song feel tired. Not
even Married With Children overplayed that song as much as this. Oh, and the
less said about Uptown Funk's bastard child of a theme song with Let’s Get Nuts, the
better.
Along with the many other things that carry from the first
film (the off-putting animation quality, the weak acting, the reliance on weak
wordplay for its jokes), the big carry-over is that lingering feeling that this
film should be making a bigger impact than it actually does. I mean, the
trailer promised us wild animals tearing down ferris wheels and blowing up
popcorn stands; this should get by on
Rule Of Cool, right? Well, we don’t quite get that here either. As bombastic as
the chase scenes can get, and there’s some definite creativity to be found in
the individual set pieces, it suffers from a distinct lack of restraint. We
aren’t given any real moments to drink in what’s happening, so a lot of it ends
up going in one eye and out the other. It’s honestly the same problem as a lot
of Michael Bay action movies, where the need to keep the audience’s attention
goes so overboard that the visual overload ends up paradoxically losing the audience’s attention.
And it
didn’t have to be this way! As plain as the characters are, particularly the
antagonists who are characterised so flatly you’d swear that they escaped the
cutting room floor of a Captain Planet episode, there’s at least some fun to be had in how unashamedly
evil they are. Not nearly enough and at not nearly enough of a consistent rate,
but there is something here.
This is insanely cynical for a kid’s film. Not cynical in
terms of “understanding” what audiences want to see, like with last year’s
trainwreck The Emoji Movie, but cynical in terms of character attitudes and
overall tone. It starts out on a note that, after securing the Nut Shop in the
previous film, the animals are growing too complacent with their surroundings
and becoming lazy. “If you want something, you have to work for it” is the
general tone of the film, embodied through how Surly would much rather just
take it easy than actually have to work to maintain his lifestyle. However,
let’s take that main conceit and apply to the film proper… and it’s here where
the real issue with this thing presents
itself.
Aside from the usual blandness that passes for humour in
this series, there’s quite a lot of dialogue expressly intended to put certain
characters ‘in their place’. Andie ends up telling Surly to his face that
“you’re not as funny as you think you are”. There’s a lot of head-crushing
irony in lines like this, but it also highlights a very real hypocrisy at the
heart of the film. For all its talk of leading by example and how preserving
one’s livelihood involves working hard for it, this film shows an absolute lack
of willing to practice what it preaches. It comes across like a guy sleeping
half-naked on a park bench, face still stained with ketchup from the previous
night’s hot dogs, and then getting up just to tell the guy running the hot dog
stand that he’s not doing his job right. That’s
what I mean by cynical in this instance: Assuming that everyone has to do their
part, so long as “everyone” doesn’t actually include yourself. We have enough
problems with people failing to do their bit for society as it is; we don’t
need films like this setting that precedent for the next generation.
All in all… have to admit, I was honestly hoping for
something good just based on the trailer. I have a certain affinity for bonkers
cinema and, between the avalanche of kung-fu mice and the mass destruction of
amusement park attraction, I thought this could skate by on that alone. But
unfortunately, between the weak writing, even weaker acting, and Weak
Triumphant production values, this film makes it incredibly frustrating to
enjoy on any real level. There are moments that could have worked if separated
from the whole, like the scenes between Surly and Buddy or the romance between
Precious and Frankie (or ‘Frecious’ as they call themselves, because apparently
even the better parts need to fail somehow), but the production in its entirety
leaves little to nothing of any real value to latch onto. And just to make
things worse, this film was internationally distributed by The Weinstein
Company… you know, just in case this whole mess wasn’t depressing enough on its
own.
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