The Nutcracker Reviews

Summary Nine-year-old Mary's dull Viennese Christmas is suddenly filled with excitement and adventure following the arrival of her beloved Uncle Albert and his gift of an enchanted nutcracker. On Christmas night, Mary's new friend, The Nutcracker, or "NC," comes to life and takes her on a wondrous journey into his magical world of fairies, sugar...

• Action

• Family

• Fantasy

• Musical

My Score

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Terry Gilliam-ish territory here, spiked with imagery from Holocaust nightmares and drug trips. Attention, university film clubs: Here's your cult-ready midnight-movie programming.

The familiarity of the music may actually be a disadvantage; the ear wants the melodies to conform to one's memory of them, but instead they've been tortured into compliance with the needs of a standard movie musical.

It's a good movie. The movie Narnia comes to mind. It is clear from the trailer that the fantasy and animated film is well written, well directed and very interesting. Good cinematography and graphic effects make the movie very attractive.

Not even the lease bit amusing or entertaining, The Nutcracker attempts to pull a entertain but ultimately fails because of It's obtuse story lousy characters.

Your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived on schedule and it's called The Nutcracker in 3D.

From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie?

Do not, in fact, go at all. Because aside from the actual nutcracker, most of the crucial elements are missing from Andrei Konchalovsky's bizarre miscalculation. Magic and joy top the list.

Even if the film were well done, it would still be a travesty.

The wildest thing about this movie is its faith that what kids (and parents) really want for Christmas is a Nutcracker version of the Final Solution.

The most incredible thing about this movie is that the entire film shifts from being a fun children's musical to a rat-holocaust drama about thirty minutes in. Also, Sigmund Freud gets mentioned twice in one kids movie, which has never happened and will never happen again.

You **** might be looking at my rating and thinking, "wow, he's gonna tear into this film right from the jump." No no no, I actually have to applaud the film's director, Andrei Konchalovsky, because you really have to TRY to make a movie THIS BLATANTLY BAD. Even if you make a film on autopilot, there's a chance it doesn't end up completely unredeemable. To make a movie this awful, you actually have to walk into the studio, take a deep breath and say, "alright, let's make the worst possible film ever." Konchalovsky, you have succeeded. "The Nutcracker in 3D" (or just "The Nutcracker," if it's not in 3D) is completely unredeemable, and not even because it changes the formula, but because it's just poorly-made on every level. It's poorly acted, it's horribly written, it's filled with cheesy special effects, and it feels way too long. It's 110 minutes long, so we can't really give the film a point for having a compact runtime, now can we? Literally, there is NOTHING GOOD about this film. Not even riffing on the film and making jokes about it with your friends can make this pile of crap any better. I don't think I've ever seen a film that I couldn't say a single good thing about, but low and behold, here it is. I didn't think I'd have to give any 0 out of 10s after "The Cat in the Hat," but then I remembered this exists and that I had to sit through it. This is the absolute worst movie I've ever seen, and if this overly-long review hasn't made the message clear yet, then let me put it out there for you in big, bold letters: DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU BE FORCED TO ENDURE THIS PAINFUL MESS! Please, stay away from this film at all costs.