Worth: $7.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Arj Barker, Jonno Roberts, Madeleine West, Gyton Grantley, Tiriel Mora, Steph Tisdale, Roy Billing
Intro:
… several tonnes short of a viable harvest.
Those who frequented the Aussie stand-up comedy scene around the mid-to-late 2000s (or have fond memories of Flight of the Conchords) might be familiar with Arj Barker, an American comedian who has been a regular fixture of the circuit for many years. As observant as he is prone to incessantly interrogating the minutiae of life, his latest venture finds him in the role of failed crypto bro Brendan Brandon, who inherits the titular nut farm and is legally strong-armed into making a decent harvest amid local land drama concerning fracking and dairy-obsessed New Zealanders.
Given his past stand-up routines, like his 7 Reasons of Power in the 2010 Great Debate on why food is better than sex, or his classic routine about analog vs. digital watches, the character of Brendan is a decent springboard for Arj’s stage persona to flesh out something worth a visit to the cinema. Unfortunately, his rambling cadence in his shows doesn’t translate well to a format with this much structure (ostensibly, but we’ll get to that), and when he isn’t just being out-of-place with his usual comedic stylings, he’s badly floundering underneath the script drafted by himself, fellow comedian Sam Bowring, and director Scott Corfield.
And yet, he gets away better than most here, as the acting is uniformly ‘not that great’. Jonno Roberts as the big bad fracker Zoron has his hammy moments, and Madeleine West as requisite love interest Kim at least looks like she’s in an actual movie, but everyone else actively and visibly struggles with the prolonged parade of gas and nut puns, rom-com cliches (for the love of spoons, can we stop with the child matchmakers please, it’s bloody creepy!), and some pretty sorry caricaturing of remote Aussie farmers. As much as the film feigns allyship with those having to deal with lacking technological infrastructure and exploitation from energy barons, it sticks so closely to pantomime that its supposedly good-natured ribbing falls flat.
It doesn’t help that the film looks like a 2010s-era TV production or, at best, streaming content you might vaguely remember scrolling past a couple years back. DP Jack Wareham’s camera framing is bare-bones, while Michael Melis’ editing makes the whole thing look like an assembly rather than the final product (note the awkward the gaps between spoken dialogue). Add to that the plentiful stock footage, the sitcom-tier production design, and what could arguably be considered a ‘soundtrack’.
The Nut Farm is several tonnes short of a viable harvest. It falls into the same landfill as comedic vehicles like Just Add Honey and The Flip Side, letting down its genuinely-talented lead and surrounding them with a myriad of baffling and just plain wasteful creative decisions. When it isn’t straining for a laugh until its eyes bulge, it’s blindly reaching for weirdness points, as if it’s a rejected Round The Twist script, with a narrative so fencing-wire thin that it makes an episode of Arj And Poopy look like it was penned by Billy Wilder.
