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‘Nutcrackers’ Review: Ben Stiller Gets Saddled With a Farm and Four Rowdy Kids in Easy-Target Heart-Tugger
Inspired by family movies from his youth, David Gordon Green delivers a predictable adoption comedy featuring four boys who behave like barn animals.
Few would say the same about the undisciplined orphans these four boys play in director David Gordon Green ’s odd-choice Toronto Film Festival opener, “ Nutcrackers ”: an almost feral wolfpack who depend on their uptight uncle, Michael Maxwell ( Ben Stiller), to spare them the indignity of an orphanage after their parents both die in a car accident. Whereas his disheveled siblings, Junior (Ulysses) and twins Samuel (Atlas) and Simon (Arlo), have been made to look like long-haired flower children, Homer has soulful brown eyes, dark lashes and obvious lost-puppy appeal. Green clearly wants to reconnect with a time when movies let kids go rogue, though the result lands closer to Cameron Crowe’s sappy crowd-pleaser “We Bought a Zoo.” After spending his first night at the Kicklighter home, Michael awakens to find the brothers mud-dogging in his Porsche.
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