It took four years after principal photography wrapped on Get A Job (2016) for the film to get a release. This delay was caused by issues between distributors and rights owners rather than some fallout between the production company and the filmmakers or some attempt at censoring or recutting the movie. Get A Job, like its main characters, is a templar to mediocrity that was in search of its big break.
Get A Job is a film about a group of recent college graduates looking for work and attempting to define their career paths. Their journey is then juxtaposed with that of an older man, one of their fathers, who has to find a new job in his fifties. But the script is so witless and so void of nuance that, other than the difference of ages, there is no contrast between the old and the young looking for work. Get A Job has but one sentiment and it broadcasts it without variation over the course of a roughly ninety minute runtime: follow that dream.
Great actors like Anna Kendrick, Marcia Gay Harden, Alison Brie, Bruce Davison and Bryan Cranston consistently have their talents thwarted by a script that fails to find any real comedy in any of the myriad of situations that the writers have imagined. These actors can elevate their scenes with their skills but there is a limit as to how much a turd can really shine. The rest of the ensemble isn’t bad, they just can’t find any dimension to their paper thin characters.
Get A Job was directed by Dylan Kidd whose first feature film Roger Dodger (2002) got a lot of buzz and was a modest hit. The verve and contagious enthusiasm of that small first feature is completely absent in Get A Job. Kidd directs Get A Job like some television pilot from the late nineties with bright, flat lighting and only the most basic coverage. Get A Job has all of the visual tenacity of the decor of a doctor’s office.
Finding a job and keeping a job is a real struggle that everyone has to deal with so it is amazing that there are no contemporary comedies that address this national epidemic successfully. Get A Job has so much potential and it wastes it on crass, juvenile jokes. There are moments where the film thinks it has successfully tugged the heart strings of the viewer that are so painful to watch because of the total failure of that enterprise. Get A Job is not an unsung classic or hidden gem, it’s a corpse that needs to be kept buried.
