By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Cal Brunker
Cast (Voice): Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl, Maya Rudolph, Isabela Moner, Peter Stormare, Bobby Cannavale, Tom Kenny, Bobby Moynihan, Jeff Dunham, Gabriel Iglesias and Jackie Chan.
Rating: Poor.
Surly, Andie and the rest of the fury animals return in “The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” and compared to the previous film there was an improvement but still the movie failed.
Three years after the events of the first film, again the movie centers in Surly (Will Arnett) a lazy squirrel that knows lives in an abandoned peanut store with his good friend Buddy and the rest of the park animals. The store explodes, which forces Surly and the rest of the animals to return to the park.
There, Surly will meet again with his good friend and female squirrel Andie (Katherine Heigl). Everything goes well until they find out that The Mayor (Bobby Moynihan) wants to demolish their park and create a dysfunctional amusement park.
This represents a threat to all the animals and they must act together to impede this project become a reality.
They will ask for the help of Mr. Feng (Jackie Chan) a mouse that leads an army and together they will defend their home before it´s too late.
The major problem that made “The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature” a movie that doesn´t work started with the screenplay.
This was a problem in the previous film from 2014, making it one of the year´s worst films. Here there were some changes, but still had elements that didn´t work.
The characters didn´t had to much depth and I felt that the movie still focused in one target which were children and the adult part was left aside. For a movie of this genre you need both elements to make it work.
Like I mentioned before there was improvement compared to the first film but the results could have been much better if time would have been invested in the screenplay written by Bob Barlen, Cal Brunker and Scott Bindley.
The movie had funny moments and the message about the value of friendship is very clear in this film but at the same time the movie was very predictable.
Again the movie had potential to be a better sequel than the original version but this wasn´t the case. If they do a third part of this film I hope the filmmakers learn their lesson from this movie and the previous one.
“The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature” it´s one of the weakest movies in the animation genre and I cannot give a recommendation to it.