The Nut Job Reviews

I wasn’t expecting much from this flick but my daughter was apparently eager to check it out so we ended up watching the damned thing yesterday. Basically, ever since ‘Toy Story’ was released 20 years ago (damned… I feel so old now…), virtually every single studio has been trying to get a piece from the new market of CGI animated features but, except for Pixar and a very few others, the results have been mostly underwhelming. This movie is a fine example. Indeed, even though it was apparently a box-office success, I thought it was just terrible. Indeed, the animation was rather poor and, above all, the story and the characters involved were just so boring. Seriously, they tried to be clever by combining 2 heists at the same time but it was really underwhelming. Apparently, it was co-produced in South Korea so they felt they had to add PSY singing ‘Gangnam Style’ during the end-credits. I mean, sure, it must have been fun to have this cameo for the kids but, in my opinion, it shows how low the level was with this production. To conclude, I thought the whole thing was really weak and I don’t think it is worth a look at all.

This can't be worse than Free Birds so that in itself is enough for me to check this out regardless of ratings. I did like the dual heist storyline and thought it was a really interesting way to do this story. There are a few pretty funny moments in my opinion. I saw someone say in a review of this on IMDB that they weren't sure of some characters relevance to the story. I saw no problems with identifying characters roles. I thought some of it was a bit over the top at trying to be funny. As I thought this was loads better than Free Birds. There are several innuendos throughout of course. It's funny that to get adults to enjoy children's movies they have to thrown in tons of inappropriate sayings. Of course though I guess that is to be expected when your movie is about squirrels and nuts. When I saw the commercial for this I thought the dog sounded like a boy, but it wasn't as they clearly say it's a she in the movie. She was played by Maya Rudolph who honestly I could care less about. My favorite character was definitely Buddy which is funny because of the fact other cartoons with squirrels in them I usually favor them instead of the main characters. The little bird henchman in this reminds me of Angry Birds. Was that intentional? The ending was a bit odd because How would Precious know the exact whereabouts of Surly? Did she get his scent? If so that doesn't really explain how she could smell him from so far away! Also if she could smell him that well how did she know where he was before taking Buddy to him? Did she find him before Buddy? Anyways they don't really answer those questions. The ending was sweet though. This wasn't too bad. It's watchable, but it can be a hit or miss.