The 2010 Flop The Nutcracker in 3-D Lives Up to Its Reputation as One of the Worst Movies Ever Made
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When you make writing about failure a major component of your career for a solid decade and a half, as I have, certain flops loom large in your consciousness. These are movies whose failures are so spectacular and so historic that any self-respecting column about cinematic disasters is duty-bound to cover them.
I’m talking about movies like 2010’s The Nutcracker in 3D, AKA The Nutcracker: The Untold Story. Tango & Cash director Andrei Konchalovsky’s bizarre desecration of the beloved ballet and Yuletide perennial scored a richly merited ZERO on Rotten Tomatoes. That means that of all the esteemed critics in the world, NOT A SINGLE SOUL LIKED IT. It struck out just as hard with audiences, grossing a smidge over twenty million dollars despite an eighty million dollar budget.
I probably should have written up The Nutcracker in 3D ages ago but I am a Juggalo and Juggalos are not known for their love of ballet. Yesterday, however, I went with my eight year old son to see a production of The Nutcracker. Now as a Juggalo there are certain things I not only expect but angrily demand from a live performance, like getting sprayed with cheap soda and people yelling “Whoop Whoop!” as a greeting and celebratory cry.
This production of The Nutcracker had none of that. Instead it was just two hours of people dancing. That might sound stale but it was actually pretty fresh. I’m not sure I’ll ever go to another ballet again but I like being able to experience different kinds of art with my son.
I am not a ballet fan but the monsters behind The Nutcracker in 3D seem even less fond of the art form. Konchalovsky’s idea for making a story that has proven wildly popular for over a century all over the world relevant for contemporary audience involves cutting out ALL the dance, destroying Tchaikovsky’s beautiful music with Tim Rice’s almost impressively abysmal lyrics and adding 3-D, mindless, gaudy spectacle and LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF HITLER.
you know, for kids!
Why is there lots and lots of lots of Hitler in this adaptation of a ballet from 1892? That is a damn good question. I guess the filmmakers wanted to establish that the Rat King and his evil minions are bad rodents, real rat-wing extremists and who is worse than Adolf Hitler?
Sometimes a performance is so unforgettably awful that whenever you think of a particular actor, that’s the first film that springs to mind no matter how many good films they’ve made. That’s how I felt about Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending and that’s how I feel about John Turturro’s hypnotically horrifying turn as what is essentially an Effete Rodent Version of Hitler with a hairstyle that’s redolent of Andy Warhol’s iconic silver mane while anticipating the notorious do known as The Karen.
In The Nutcracker in 3-D, The Rat King literally vows to “have an empire of ONE THOUSAND YEARS!” He promises a Rodent Reich the likes of which the world has never known as he pursues a Final Solution towards exterminating humans and humanity.
To assist him in his genocidal quest, this flamboyant proponent of mass extermination has created a factory of death that burns children’s toys—not unlike how Jewish children were massacred in Concentration Camps during the Holocaust, something this crazily misguided children’s fantasy movie never lets audiences forget—in order to create a massive black cloud that blots out the sun and creates a cold, grayish-black dystopia unfit for human habitation.
Hitler isn’t the only wildly out of place element of this shit show. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, Nathan Lane plays a twinkly-eyed, fourth wall breaking Albert Einstein, AKA “Uncle Albert.”
Ah, but it’s not the Einstein of the historical record but rather than the idealized fantasy of the public imagination, the living embodiment of love and laughter and light.
That’s his catchphrase!
This musical for small, dumb children also prominently involves Sigmund Freud, who is name-dropped repeatedly and is apparently considered a guru in the children’s house although he thankfully does not make an actual appearance in the film itself.
Mary and Max’s cold, ambitious parents, Joseph (Richard E. Grant) and Louise (Julia Vysotskaya) leave them in Uncle Albert’s care so they can go do sinister adult things not involving their children.
Uncle Albert brings his suspiciously goyish-seeming niece Mary (Elle Fanning) and nephew Max (Aaron Michael Drozin) a dollhouse that is a window into a world of fantasy and imagination and a Nutcracker.
Ah, but this is not your daddy’s boring old Nutcracker. No, this Nutcracker goes by the hip moniker NC and is undoubtedly down with NFTs and OPP.
We learn from The Snow Fairy that our boy NC used to be a human prince whose kingdom was overtaken by Turturro’s Ratolf Hitler and his witch mother The Rat Queen (Frances de la Tour).
The Rat Queen then turned the human prince into a wooden nutcracker so that she and her Fascist progeny can transform the fantasy kingdom into Aushwitz, circa 1944.
In Nutcracker form, NC is pure nightmare fuel. He has dead eyes, an inexpressive, literally wooden face and a lurching, stilted way of moving that’s appropriate considering that he’s essentially a bootleg, more honest Pinocchio but is distractingly creepy all the same.
The CGI in The Nutcracker in 3-D is straight out of the Uncanny Valley, particularly rats with disconcertingly human faces. So I was excited when the curse is lifted and NC becomes a real boy again and bummed when he falls victim to still ANOTHER curse and reverts back to being a creepily animated smasher of nuts all the same.
It’s total war with fuck-all to do with the ballet it’s supposed to be adapting. The Rat King’s forces include flying mech-rats and rats on motorcycles. At no point are the film’s humanoid rodent-men anything other than deeply disturbing. They reminded me of the Whoville residents in the horrifying 2000 adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a previous nadir in make-up and character design.
Forgot not being a pure ballet: there’s almost no dance in The Nutcracker in 3-D and what little there is is almost impressively awful. When the children awkwardly cavort alongside their Uncle Albert Einstein as he murders an awful ditty about relativity (you know, because he’s Albert fucking Einstein for some goddamn reason) early in the film it feels unrehearsed and non-choreographed.
for kids!
It’s as if these poor children asked the director for guidance and he told them that they should just do whatever they want, as it didn’t matter and nobody was going to care about the quality of dance IN AN ADAPTATION OF ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS BALLETS OF ALL TIME!
The director, who also co-wrote the screenplay and will have to answer for his crimes on judgment day, justified his decision to remove all the ballet from a famous ballet on the grounds that “ballet cannot work in cinema very well.”
You know what else does not work in cinema very well? Whatever the fuck this is. Barb Wire is a faithful adaptation of Casablanca compared to this insanity.
It took me twelve years to finally subject myself to this famous flop but it very much lives up to its reputation as one of the most god-awful and misconceived flops of all time.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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