Review: Get a Job (2016)

There’s a song played frequently on the radio at the moment which I’m in love with. It’s called ‘Stressed Out’ by Twenty One Pilots, and at first it just had a catchy tune, but now I really feel like I can relate to the lyrics. Bear with me, this is going somewhere, I promise.

The opening to Get a Job (2016) is perfect. It reminds us that when we were kids, everything was given to us, and we were praised for every tiny thing we did. Then, one day, at the end of our mandatory education, we’re thrown into the real world where no one cares about our small achievements, and we have to actually work for a living. That’s how I feel about life right now, or at least did a few years ago. I’ve found my feet now, thankfully.  I've just about found my feet and now I'm counting down to retirement!

Back to that song, Stressed Out. There’s a particular line that give me same feeling as the opening to that movie: Used to dream of outer space but now they're laughing at our face,

Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money."

So, with a relevant and relatable plot, and a huge cast of some of my favourite actors and actresses, (Anna Kendrick, Alison Brie, Bryan Cranston, Miles Teller, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) I knew I couldn’t go wrong by giving this movie some of my time. Yeah. About that.  How could it be anything other than awesome with this cast, no seriously how?!

Everything starts out perfectly fine. Will (Teller) and his girlfriend Jillian (Kendrick) are celebrating Jillian’s new job, which stirs up trouble in their relationship when Will is told he needs to step up. His father is fed up of financing him, and he needs to put his creative dreams aside and enter the corporate world. With an unusually short runtime of 1hr 23mins, this plot is plenty, especially when Jillian winds up losing her job and the roles get reversed, but so many sub plots are thrown into the mix that I couldn’t work out what was actually going on anymore.  Ditto, completely lost!

It’s a shame, because each plot in itself is absolutely fine. Will’s father loses his job, and has huge difficulty finding a new one because of his loyalty to his previous employer and his age. That’s a huge problem for the older generation right now, and could have tied in perfectly with Will’s story, given a longer runtime. But that’s not all. Each of Will’s friends has their own storyline of taking their first step on the career ladder, and that’s where it gets too messy. Whilst trying to desperately tie up the loose threads in the plot, it seems those responsible forgot to add in any jokes. The only comedic relief came from Alison Brie’s character who seemed to serve no purpose other than making sexual innuendos. She was funny, at least.

I have to completely agree, they really jam packed a lot of plot points into a particularly short running time.  In honestly, I kind of gave up about half way through, I didn't give a monkey's if any of them got a job, lost a job or sold their mother for a job and with the title being what it is, I'm guessing you are supposed to care about that stuff.  It starts off really logical and believable and rapidly becomes ridiculous, becoming a vice president of something or other after 6 months in a company or rugby tackling various security staff so your Dad can get an 'interview' in an elevator.  All bloody ridiculous!

So finally, after looking the movie up online to find out whether I was just being a miserable sod, I found out that Get a Job was made in 2012, and has sat on the shelf for the last 4 years, with Anna Kendrick herself confident that the movie would never get a release date. That says more than I ever could.  I think she was probably secretly hoping as well to be fair!