Review: Get a Job

There are many reasons why films are put on the shelf. It can be as complicated as bankruptcies, lawsuits, and creative differences. Or it can be as straightforward as the film not being any good. Get a Job, made in 2012 but only now being released, falls in the latter category. It is a terrible movie, painfully unfunny, resoundingly pointless, and a woeful waste of its talented cast, many of whom have made solid names for themselves during the four-year interim.

"What are you going to do about work, Will?" his girlfriend Jillian (Anna Kendrick) wonders. Will (Miles Teller) is part of the Facebook generation of millenials, the type who views his recent promotion from intern to paid employee at LA Weekly as a springboard in helping him build his brand. The brand building is delayed when budgetary cuts get him laid off and he's forced to go through a handful of bad jobs before landing a position as a videographer at an executive consulting firm.

Meanwhile, his roommates (Christoper Mintz-Plasse, Brandon T. Jackson and Nicholas Brown) spend their days hanging out, playing video games, getting high, and watching porn when not building apps that would be a stalker's dream, barely teaching middle-schoolers, and projectile vomiting during an office hazing ritual. Jillian eventually joins this bunch of bland twentysomethings when she gets fired from her job. Once driven, she devolves into a stereotypical slacker.

It's not just the kids having problems in the working world. Will's dad (Bryan Cranston) was so efficient at his job that he made himself obsolete, and is now camping out at a coffee shop getting advice from the barista. There's some commentary about entitlement versus putting in the necessary effort, expectations versus harsh realities, but it's nothing that hasn't been conveyed with more insight and resonance in the most perfunctory scene of HBO's Girls.

While it's no mystery that the end result didn't see the light of day for four years, it is puzzling that it was ever made in the first place. The less said about Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel's screenplay, the better. Director Dylan Kidd, who did the marvelous Roger Dodger, was smart enough to cast actors that make Get a Job a near-tolerable watch, but strands them in stale and shapeless scenes. A must-miss.

Get a Job

Directed by: Dylan Kidd

Written by: Kyle Pennekamp, Scott Turpel

Starring: Miles Teller, Anna Kendrick, Bryan Cranston, Marcia Gay Harden, Alison Brie, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Brandon T. Jackson, Nicholas Brown, John Cho, Greg Germann, John C. McGinley, Jorge Garcia, Bruce Davison, Jay Pharaoh