One can’t ignore the irony around Get A Job’s huffing, last-place cross of the distribution finish line. One of the film’s main characters, played by Bryan Cranston, is a man with top notch qualifications on paper, but still can’t even land an interview with The Decisionmaker to gain employment. Shot in 2012 with a laundry list of talented actors (and a director, Dylan Kidd, who seemed off to a good start in 2002) Get A Job got caught up in corporate shuffles and looked for a while as if it would never be released. Now it limps to the marketplace on VOD and a contractually obligated single theatrical screen in New York. Sometimes merely being qualified isn’t enough.
Is it that bad? No, but if it weren’t for the fact that it starred Miles Teller, Anna Kendrick, Bryan Cranston, Brandon T Jackson, Alison Brie, Marcia Gay Harden and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and had cameos from a slew of recognizable faces like Jay Pharoah, Marc Maron, John Cho, Ravi Patel, Jorge Garcia and (really, I could go on here), I don’t think we’d be talking about this little movie at all.
Its primary joy to an attuned viewer is inextricably tied to its inadvertent recent time capsule quality, like checking in on a parallel entertainment universe. Would our perception of Teller and Kendrick be different if Get A Job, this occasionally amusing but unimpressive millennial romp, had been released before Whiplash or Pitch Perfect? For those who care deeply about the careers of movie stars, the tenuous way in which a new talent is brought to market is maybe something over which to lose sleep! For normal folks, this is just an oddball VOD movie with a dippy plot and a few modest yuks.
Teller’s Will Davis is something of a toned-down Seth Rogen-type, a videographer who thought he landed a great gig after college. Turns out he’s been downsized before his first day, and ends up selling out a bit, shooting video résumés for a corporate placement firm. He’s got an evil boss (Harden) and a sexed-up co-worker (Brie, very funny) and there’s a magical Hispanic janitor (Garcia) to provide drugs and folk wisdom.
Davis’s father, Cranston, has recently been laid off, and spends the duration of the film going slightly mad as he tries to adapt to modern work culture. This involves dying his beard black and getting on Twitter, but not knowing what “lol” stands for. Davis has a bunch of dopey roommates, also struggling with paying the rent. Brandon T Jackson gets a low-level Wall Street-type job, and once he passes his hazing (which involves quaffing the ejaculate of a woodland creature) he begins to fit in. A stoner played by Nicholas Braun ends up a middle school teacher, enlisting his pupils to build him elaborate bongs. Christopher Mintz-Plasse (remember him?) also lives in this den of video games, porn and weed, but he’s so annoying I don’t even want to dwell on him any longer than I have to.
Anna Kendrick, who was so extraordinary in 2015’s The Last Five Years, can’t help but breathe life into a scene, even when it’s in a picture as by-the-numbers as this. As Davis’s smart, pretty girlfriend she doesn’t have much to do, frankly, but does it with charm, and its something of a nice twist that while Teller and Kendrick’s characters have obstacles, their relationship remains solid.
Get A Job’s primary problem is that it doesn’t know if it wants to be a realistic look at millennials and the current economy, or go for the cheap gag about the jive-talking pimp renting out a sleazy motel. The entire film is burdened with a wretched, canned soundtrack, which is particularly egregious because our lead character is a video editor who uses wretched, canned music. The many sitcom sequences, like Bryan Cranston’s slow-motion dash to speak to an exec transforming into an American football play, are, at best, mildly amusing. But there is something to be said about the old cliche about cream rising. Even with bad material, these are all very talented actors. I’m not saying you should give this film the position, but it won’t kill you to glance at the résumé.
