It feels like forever since we've seen Ben Stiller as the lead in a movie, but he's back now with Nutcrackers, streaming on Hulu or Disney+ for my fellow Canadians. The film screened as the opening night gala at TIFF this year, so I did have some decent expectations. Sadly, this is about as unmemorable as they come.
The film follow Stiller as Michael, a single man in Chicago on the verge of the biggest deal of his professional career. That is thrown into flux as life pulls him to rural Ohio where he is stuck looking after his late sister's four rambunctious kids as child services tries to find them a new home. You may be asking yourself, why is this called Nutcrackers? I was wondering the same thing until basically the last act of the movie, where Michael suggests the kids put on their own version of The Nutcracker to show people why they should be adopted.
Ultimately this is a film that feels like the Christmas element was shoehorned in just to get people to watch it. The Nutcracker part feels pretty forced, and aside from remarks about Christmas coming up and one scene with a Christmas party, the film has really nothing about it that posits it as a holiday movie. Perhaps where this most feels like a holiday classic is simply in how paint by numbers it is narratively. This is truly among the most predictable movies I've seen in quite some time, not to say that predictability is an inherent bad thing, but this truly is as generic as it gets.
Now the generic nature of the film doesn't mean it comes without merits. Stiller is his natural charming self, delivering a performance that isn't anything special in his filmography, but one that we just haven't gotten to see in a while so it's appreciated. The kids are admittedly pretty annoying at first, but it's easy to wind up appreciating them as the film goes on. Linda Cardellini plays the worker tasked with finding a foster home for them, and frankly she should be in every movie because she is a delight. I did find myself getting attached to the characters despite knowing exactly where the story was going, and there are a handful of quite funny moments that make this a decent watch.
It's ultimately just a meh holiday movie that will no doubt grace many televisions over the next month and wind up being mostly forgotten afterwards. 2.5/5
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