PLOT: A Chicago executive (Ben Stiller) must look after his late sister’s four rambunctious children while trying to find them a foster home the state won’t separate them.
REVIEW: Believe it or not, it’s been seven whole years since Ben Stiller last headlined a movie. Granted, he hasn’t exactly been idle, with him making a whole new name for himself as a director with the limited series Escape at Dannemora and then his major hit for Apple TV +, Severance (which has a second season on the way). Given this new move behind the camera, outside of cameos, he hasn’t headlined a movie since the one-two punch of Brad’s Status and The Meyerowitz Stories back in 2017. The last Frat Pack-style Stiller movie was Zoolander 2 from the year before (a movie whose failure reportedly deeply shook his confidence).
His return to form, Nutcrackers, casts Stiller to type, with him playing a neurotic, selfish Chicago businessman who’s forced to look after his four nephews following the death of their parents. All four boys are played by real-life siblings (Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson), and they’re hellions, with the opening finding them hot-wiring and then destroying a ride at a local amusement park.
What’s surprising about Nutcrackers is just how unsurprising and straightforward a family comedy it is, given that it comes from director David Gordon Green. While now mostly known for his horror reboots, there was a time when Green was an indie darling, with movies like All the Real Girls, George Washington and Snow Angels establishing him as kind of a gen-x Terrence Malick. With Nutcrackers, he’s in a more mainstream mode, turning in a pleasant family comedy that should play well on Hulu throughout the holiday season.
Stiller mostly plays the hits, although he dials down the character’s neurosis, and plays Uncle Mike as a slicker character, with him never cartoonishly losing his temper in the classic way one associates him with. Yet, as in any other family comedy he’s made, it’s pretty transparent in how quickly Mike’s going to bond with the rambunctious, wild, but ultimately good-natured kids, even if he tries to pawn them off on the town’s wealthiest citizen (Glow’s Toby Huss). He even gets a love interest in Linda Cardellini as a beautiful social worker, hoping he’ll keep the kids together until she can find them a home.
For the most part, this is Green working in a mainstream mode, but there are glimpses at his older self towards the end, when Mike convinces the boys to put on a staging of The Nutcracker they’ve written themselves. He hopes their performance will endear them to the town and get them adopted quicker. This sequence feels like old-time indie Green, with perhaps the only unpredictable thing about the movie being that it ends in an extended ballet sequence.
One thing to make clear – while I’ve said Nutcrackers is old-fashioned and predictable, I don’t actually mean that as a put-down. Studios don’t often make these kinds of movies anymore, at least not this well, so even if Nutcrackers feels like a studio movie from 2004, there’s nothing wrong with that. Stiller plays his usual part as well as he ever has (he doesn’t seem to age), while the Janson boys are fun to watch. If you’re looking for a new holiday comedy, stream it on Hulu. You’ll probably like it.
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