Review of The Nut Job

After watching "The Nut Job," I couldn't help but wonder if, even though it is a kid's film, could kids really enjoy this movie? I acknowledge this wasn't meant to be a family film where adults and kids could laugh together like Disney, Pixar, Sony and DreamWorks makes but this film really feels like it is dragging at the bottom of the barrel to make something that is barely worth watching. First off, the humor in this film just feels like they hired people who have no concept of what comedy is and have never been around children in their lives and said, "Hey, write something a ten year old will laugh at," and all they could think of was fart jokes…and when that well was run dry, they just decided to not even bother with jokes anymore—or at least that is what I'm assuming because the end result was jokes that just weren't plain funny. Granted, they weren't groan inducing despite the fact they hired two awfully generic comics (Jeff Dunham and Gabriel Iglesias) to do voices but they just weren't humorous in the slightest. I would like to think kids are a little smarter than what this film throws at you and mislabels as jokes. Then there is the voice acting…while not bad, most of the casting just didn't fit the character. Katherine Heigl sounds bored as Andie and Liam Neeson just feels thrown in (his character doesn't even get a proper name, he's a raccoon and they call him Raccoon—such creativity!). While Will Arnett is a funny guy, his gruff voice just didn't fit with the little purple squirrel he was playing. Finally, it was clear Brendan Fraser was having a blast as his character but his enthusiasm just ends up amplifying the other members of the cast who are around to do nothing else but collect a paycheck. Finally, the story just doesn't have enough working for it to justify being a film that has a running time of over an hour. The story feels like it would have worked better as an animated short that airs before something far better produced, so the end product just feels like the producers are constantly padding out the running length and stretching every scene for every single second of footage they can get. It makes the entire film feel like you are being dragged through a story that should have been resolved easily at the start but the film went sentient and is now refusing to allow the conflict in the story to resolve. Overall, "The Nut Job" was fairly unimpressive and entirely forgettable. It really didn't even have anything working in its favor (and I won't even mention how the animation, by today's standards, just looks cheap). After watching it on DVD, the only thing that came to my mind was, "Do kids actually find this amusing?" and, "Why exactly is a sequel being made? It really made THAT much money?"