David Gordon Green’s career is one of the most unpredictable in Hollywood. Since his masterful and celebrated debut George Washington, he’s not been shy about planting a flag in a wide variety of films––dramedies, gritty thrillers, franchise horror reboots, political satires, and stoner comedies among them. It’s been more than a decade since he has made a film that resembles anything like Nutcrackers. 2013’s Prince Avalanche was a peculiar, convention-straying work built on a loose screenplay that tended to meander and flow in various different directions, even touching Malickian territory in its poetic aims. It might not have wholly worked, but it did aim to buck conventions of a male-bonding film. Nutcrackers, on the other hand, follows them to the T, such that its unfolding feels ludicrously prescribed.

From the get-go, you know exactly where the ripely comedic premise will go. Mike (Ben Stiller), a stuck-up corporate workaholic and self-involved uncle,...