Get a Job - the greatest movie never released in theaters?

June 23, 2024.

Get a Job is odd and flawed, but if you allow yourself to go with the movie's premise and flow there's a good chance you will enjoy it. The absolutely stellar cast portraying a mix of down-to-earth and over-the-top characters is a ride.

Get a Job was filmed in 2012, but it was never theatrically released, and not released at all until 2016. By that time the movie was completely out of tune with the times. In 2012 the job market was still weighed down by the glacial pace of the recovery from the Great Recession. That had gone away by 2016. Youtube and other tech platforms were by then less seen as drivers of opportunity shown in the movie and more as manipulative data hoarders and privacy invaders.

In addition to that, the portrayal of the office environments feel more dotcom-era than 2012, but that is more of a charming quirk than a negative. The movie is also amusingly pre-Me Too era in its sensibilities.

All that said, the relentless corporate layoffs of 2023 and 2024 have given the movie a new relevance.

It is an anti Reality Bites that explicitly exhorts viewers to reject participation trophies, to "work your ass off," "never quit believing" and "be special." As an aside, former New England Patriots QB and seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady disagrees with that last part. As he stated in his Patriots Hall of Fame Induction speech: "To be successful, you don't have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren't: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it."

The movie's main character is Will Davis (played by Miles Teller). He has a wannabe-girlboss girlfriend, Jillian (Anna Kendrick) who lives in a carefully appointed apartment. He lives with a group of pothead roommates who are surprisingly driven for being such potheads. There's Luke (Brandon T Jackson, who played the black guy - the actual black guy - in Tropic Thunder), Charlie, and Ethan (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who's been in a ton of movies, the only one of which I've seen even a bit of is This is the End).

Bryan Cranston rounds out the core of the cast as Will's dad Roger.

The movie follows these six characters as they navigate the challenging job market in the wake of the Great Recession 2008-2009. It was, unsurprisingly, a common theme for movies at the time. Cranston's character comes across as one that fell out of the much more serious movie The Company Men (2010) while Kendrick's is quite similar to the one she played in Up in the Air (2009).

Along the way we meet Diller, a trading-floor manager played by John C. McGinley (the doctor in the classic television comedy show Scrubs) who basically reprises his role from Wall Street ("Knicks and chicks!").

Because of the sprawling cast there isn't much depth to any of the characters' journey. They're all kind of rushed but in return the movie moves along and makes good use of its many plot lines.

Get a Job is a movie that has been driven to desperation by years and years of rejection and indifference, asking for an opportunity to show you why it deserves your time. Give it a view.