On paper, Get a Job has the potential to be a surprisingly comedy that provides whip-smart commentary on this post Great Recession job market, millennials and their perceived reputation by the culture at large and serve as a great starring vehicle for Miles Teller and Anna Kendrick.
Instead, it comes off as an utter mess that insults women, millennials and even baby boomers.
Teller (soon to be seen in War Dogs) and Kendrick are Will and Jillian, a couple who have just graduated college. Jillian has a great job and Will, well, Will is trying to find his place in the world like so many do after college… particularly in a job market still recovering from The Great Recession. Will lives in a house with several of his college buddies (including Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Ethan, Brandon T. Jackson’s Luke and Nicholas Braun’s Charlie). They are all big stoners and seem to all think that things will just work out for them, an often quoted complaint of their generation that this film does nothing to debunk.
Kendrick comes off as a shrilly girlfriend who is always pestering her boyfriend to do something with her life, without having the benefit of a screenplay that gives her any type of character that warrants her coming off as the expert in life improvement. It’s a sad display for the talented actress, who might we remind people that she has an Oscar nomination (for Up in the Air) under her belt?! She is just one of the many characters who are poorly drawn in this film that quickly devolves from sounds good with its premise and all-star cast, to disappointing/offensive convoluted disaster.
Teller, as we saw in Whiplash, is also a true talent. His acting prowess is wasted on the role of Will because the actor simply comes off as playing a variation on a character that we’ve seen him portray before, in mindless comedies such as 21 and Over. He too deserves better.
And too does the Oscar nominated and Oscar winning supporting cast. Bryan Cranston (a recent Oscar nominee in 2016 for his role in Trumbo) is Will’s father. He too is out of a job by the time the film gets going and watching the esteemed thespian dye his hair and beard black to “appear younger” and try to do a video resume, is simply a crushing blow to us to see as a huge fan of the man who has entertained us since we discovered him on Seinfeld.
Can someone please tell us what Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden is doing in this film? She’s portraying an executive at an exclusive executive search firm whose clinging to power seems to be her desire to sexually engage, abuse and harass her underlings. See, it’s a repulsive look at Baby Boomers, too!
And when it comes to its prime target audience, Millennials, they turn out to be the filmmaker’s prime target as well. For a generation that takes a beating daily on social media from their older compatriots for their perceived lack of motivation, lack of desire to work hard and wholehearted entitlement persona, Get a Job does nothing to rebuke these attitudes. It shows that if you smoke a ton of weed, lollygag around and complain about how hard the world is, eventually opportunity will grab you the faded T-shirt and welcome you to success.
If anything, Get a Job reinforces these anti-Millennial attitude that the culture at large has.
Which leads us to ask… who exactly is this film made for? It’s not Boomers. It’s not Millennials. It certainly is not Generation X or Y. Perhaps, it’s senior citizens? Ha! That’s funnier than anything in this film that should have been called Get a Clue.
Grade: F