Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Review: ‘The Nut Job 2’ Squirrels Away the Laughs for Itself

From left, Surly (voiced by Will Arnett) and Andie (Katherine Heigl) in “Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature.”Credit...Open Road Films
The Nut Job 2
Directed by Cal Brunker
Animation, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy
PG
1h 31m

The animated film “The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” features fluffy creatures and not much else. The jokes are thin, the computer animation is wanting and the inane plot is a series of set pieces strung together.

The critters, led by a dour squirrel named Surly (Will Arnett), are in danger of losing their city park home thanks to an egomaniacal mayor (Bobby Moynihan) with a Texan accent who plans to build a shoddy amusement park over the sanctioned greenscape.

You don’t need to see the first “Nut Job” movie to follow the sequel’s nonsensical plot and the script’s preference for bottom-shelf puns. The film’s meanspirited tone picks on both creatures and humans, like construction workers for being illiterate, animals almost too dumb to survive and the wicked rich.

Apart from Mr. Arnett’s Surly, no other animal gets more than a few scraps of screen time, including Jackie Chan as the leader of a Chinatown mice gang and Bobby Cannavale as a dimwitted pup. Surly’s relationship with his love interest, Andie (Katherine Heigl), plays out like a Goofus and Gallant comic strip in which he does things the easy way while she moralizes about the importance of hard work and coddles Surly through his tantrums.

The director Cal Brunker, previously a storyboard artist for “Despicable Me,” does not bring the warmth of that movie to this effort. Mr. Brunker, who wrote the script with five other people, fashions “Nut Job 2” as its own dull amusement park ride, where slapdash animation, a dismal story and a score by Heitor Pereira repeated ad infinitum makes for few thrills.

A correction was made on 
Aug. 14, 2017

A previous version of this review misidentified the composer of the film’s score. It is Heitor Pereira, not Ella Louise Allaire.

How we handle corrections

Rated PG. Running time:
1 hour 31 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Nut Job 2. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT