Line #28 YMMV/TheNutcrackerIn3D


1	* AccidentalInnuendo:
2	** Close your eyes and the Rat King's torture of NC sounds like the most wrong thing ever. "Open your mouth... like a good little prince!"
3	** Frau Eva saying to Mary: "Get changed, something nice... I'll help you."
4	* AngstAversion: A common criticism of the movie is that the DarkerAndEdgier take on the Rat King and his followers, particularly the use of Nazi imagery (including labor camps and massive piles of burning toys), isn't compelling enough to make up for the massive clash with the source material's whimsical tone, as most people don't go into any version of ''The Nutcracker'' wanting to think about the Holocaust. It's especially off-putting since this film is [[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids marketed as a family movie]].
5	%%* {{Anvilicious}}: [[PuttingOnTheReich The rats are Nazis!]]
6	* AudienceAlienatingPremise: ''The Nutcracker'' is already considered a HardToAdaptWork, featuring not much in the way of plot and being mostly a showcase of tightly-choreographed dancing. However, this rendition earned particular criticism for its attempt at updating the work, foregoing the original Tchaikovsky compositions and ballet (which had long been major selling points of ''The Nutcracker'') in favor of contemporary pop and featuring a Holocaust allegory subplot that came off as inappropriately heavy for what was ostensibly a holiday film for kids. All of these were cited as elements that drove away potential viewers, resulting in the film losing a whopping $69.5 million at the box office.
7	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: The group of random Russian Cossack dolls who randomly appear as the sleigh is coming up the tree. They wish the leads "Mary Christmas" then hurl themselves off the trees like lemmings, to the tune of Tchaikovsky's "Cossack Dance", [[{{Narm}} played at double-speed on kazoos]].
8	%%** "I better go to the Little Girl's Room!". Um, what, Mom? Ditto the painful "distraction" musical number.
9	* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Director/writer Andrey Konchalovskiy deliberately combined the original story of ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' with themes of Nazism and The Holocaust. It didn't do well with audiences in ''any'' country, although in all fairness, Konchalovskiy never suggests that Nazism is a good or moral thing (it's only applied to the villains, who are portrayed as eccentric, creepy and disturbing).
10	* EsotericHappyEnding: The movie ends on a positive note with Mary and Nicholas Charles ice skating together... but the story is set in 1920 Austria, which will be annexed by UsefulNotes/NaziGermany in 1938. And Mary being UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein's niece means she's at least partially Jewish.
11	* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: The Rat King figuratively pulling the length of his empire out of his ass.
12	* HamAndCheese: Creator/JohnTurturro's performance as the Rat King, when he isn't frightening children. He ''owns'' it, reaching "delicious" [[Film/StreetFighter M. Bison]] levels. Maybe he thought he was actually doing Springtime For Ratler?
13	%%* {{Narm}}: So much, but the most glaring examples are probably Uncle Albert's "Hardest thing to understand is income tax... this is a PIECE OF SHTRUDEL!" and his song about the magic pebble.%%Zero-context example per: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15540840900A88978500&page=55#comment-1368.
14	* NoYay: Mary and NC's weird flirting while he's still a creepy doll of ambiguous age. The Rat King seems to flirt with her a bit too ("I hope you’re saving the last dance for me") and so does Gielgud the chimp.
15	* OlderThanTheyThink:
16	** Some people think that Mary has gotten an AdaptationNameChange from Clara in the original ballet. That actually isn't the case, "Mary" was the name of the little girl in the original book, while "Clara" was the name of ''her doll''. The ballet simply decided to [[CompositeCharacter combine the two "characters"]].
17	** Oddly enough, this is not the first film to insert UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein into a setting via making him a relative to one of the main characters for seemingly no other reason than to make the audience go "Oh look, it's Albert Einstein!" ''[[Film/IQ1994 I.Q.]]'' is a 1994 RomanticComedy set in TheFifties in which Einstein is made the uncle of the female lead.
18	* QuestionableCasting: In a work based on a ballet, the actor who dances the most would be... Creator/JohnTurturro? He had a double for some harder moves, but what he did do was much more, and of a much better quality, than you'd expect.
19	* SoBadItsGood: Get the right group of friends to riff it with, don't fear the nut-related jokes, and this flick is more fun than spiked eggnog.
20	* SpecialEffectFailure:
21	** The CGI (especially during the snowflake dance) and the costumes of the Christmas ornaments look extremely shoddy. The Nutcracker himself, in particular, is ''horrible'', being blatantly composited onto the background in a way that doesn't look even slightly convincing and clashes blatantly with the real-world sets.
22	** The robot rat-dogs eating through the tree is especially terrible, there's only a horribly-fake wood chips particle spray effect to cover up the fact that the dogs' faces are blatantly clipping through the tree. You can also clearly see John Turturro's stunt double doing the flip off the table in his first song; and the pirouette, followed by a bit of more complex footwork, in the second.
23	** In one scene, the Rat King electrocutes his pet shark [[ForTheEvulz for no good reason]], causing its corpse to float to the top of the tank. In the ''very next scene'', the shark is back at the bottom of the tank as if nothing happened. Even worse? The animators ''forgot to animate it'', causing it to sit there motionlessly in background!
24	* {{Squick}}: The rambling reminiscence Frau Eva relates to Mary, about youthful indiscretion and spontaneous combustion.
25	* SweetnessAversion: The {{crowd song}} after the rats are defeated, which doesn't at all match the film's dark tone.
26	* SpiritualAdaptation: Given that the villains are Nazi rats armed with wacky technology, this movie features probably the closest thing to a live action version of the [[TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}} Skaven]] we have seen so far.
27	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: The horribly out-of-place "[[PuttingOnTheReich the Rats are Nazis]]" plotline could have actually served a purpose and helped the movie if the real-world horrors of the actual Nazis was used as a thematic parallel to the fantastical evil of the Rat King in Mary's dream world similarly to the allegorical villains of ''Film/TheLionTheWitchAndTheWardrobe'' or ''Film/PansLabyrinth''. Instead, the actual Third Reich goes completely unmentioned and the Nazi rat plotline isn't used for anything more original than "we'll make the rats look like Nazis because [[ObviouslyEvil Nazis are bad]]."
28	* TookTheBadFilmSeriously: Creator/AndreiKonchalovsky famously spent twenty years trying to get this film made and saw it as his magnum opus, hoping it would be a film that would be beloved by kids and adults for generations to come. The fact that the end result was so poorly received is honestly pretty heartbreaking.
29	%%** Poor, poor Creator/NathanLane, Creator/JohnTurturro and Creator/RichardEGrant. Whatever they were paying you ''wasn't enough.''
30	%%* ToyShip: Literally and figuratively with Mary and NC/The Prince.
31	* UnfortunateCharacterDesign:
32	** Why does the Nutcracker form of the Prince resemble a Canadian from ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark''?
33	** It's a mystery what the hell the filmmakers were even going for with Tinker's design, but they probably weren't thinking about making him look so much like ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy John Wayne Gacy]].''
34	* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Uncle Albert giving Mary's father a pebble and claiming it's the same one he had when he was a child is supposed to be a whimsical and heartwarming MagicFeather act, but it comes across more like him emotionally manipulating his own brother by capitalizing on a painful childhood memory.
35	* WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids: It's ''Theatre/TheNutcracker'' with a town taken over by disturbing sharp-toothed Nazi rats who burn toys to make children cry, but it's marketed as a family film.
36	* WTHCostumingDepartment: The fairy's tinfoil dress; Tinker's disturbing resemblance to serial killer John Wayne Gacy; Mary's easily-ripped and see-through clothes; the Rat King's resemblance to Creator/AndyWarhol; the Rat Queen's weird wigs.

Context YMMV / TheNutcrackerIn3D