Review: Horrible Bosses

Hollywood has long loved to exploit populist sentiment for monetary gain, and when the target of said sentiment just so happens to be big business, it’s a dream come true. (Ironically, there are few bigger businesses than the movie industry.) Thus, it is with a certain perverse glee that Horrible Bosses finds its trio of everyman protagonists conspiring to murder their cruel, hostile employers. This is not a dark comedy; it is a gleeful revenge fantasy, personifying the liberal elitist assumption that every lower-middle-class American must hate his/her boss. At a time when so much of the country would kill to have any boss–yes, even the three exaggerated assholes that headline this film–the premise seems eerily unfunny.

But it’s just a screwball comedy, a farce with no real-world implications, proponents of the film might argue. Fine. While the morality of a movie that celebrates murder should be questioned, no matter how deserving its targets, I will for a moment consider Horrible Bosses as an apolitical film. Under this guise, it is even less interesting. Why? Because the protagonists, played by Charlie Day and Jasons Bateman and Sudeikis, aren’t especially likable guys. They are typical comedy caricatures of working men: Day the guy who thanklessly does a woman’s job (he’s a dental assistant), Bateman the eternal corporate righthand-man who never gets due credit for his work, and Sudeikis the well-meaning small business protege. In other words, we’ve seen them all before in this genre. As a result, we don’t really care when they are abused by their bosses–Jennifer Aniston the sexually harassing dentist (!), Kevin Spacey the cutthroat executive, and Colin Farrell the druggie who inherits Daddy’s business, respectively–and the ensuing situations lack the feeling necessary to be funny.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have any laughs; it has its moments. Screenwriters Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein give Day some funny lines about why he’s forced to stay at his awful job–he was convicted a sex offender after drunkenly urinating on a playground at night–that perfectly play off of his established persona from TV’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. These may be too scattershot to actually flesh the character out, but they stand out as witty where most of the movie is not. Jamie Foxx also provides a few chuckles in a supporting role as the clueless ex-con who the guys initially hire as their hit-man.

But those amusing elements are all too few and far between; they are hardly enough to redeem Horrible Bosses on the whole. In fact, when the artistic integrity of the movie isn’t in question, it is usually painfully uninspired, from the one-dimensional character development to the several cliché comedy sketches (did we really need another farcical variation on the GPS?) With a main cast of six wildly talented actors, most of whom work primarily in comedy, the movie stands a real achievement in mediocrity. Since bursting onto the film scene in 2007 with the endearing documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, director Seth Gordon has made two features (this and the atrocious Reese Witherspoon/Vince Vaughn holiday rom-com Four Christmases) that do little more than suggest he should immediately return to non-fiction.

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Horrible Bosses (2011, USA). Produced by John Cheng, Diana Pokorny, Brett Ratner, John Rickard, Mary Rohlich, and Jay Stern. Directed by Seth Gordon. Written for the screen by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein. Story by Michael Markowitz. Starring Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Sloane, and Donald Sutherland. Distributed by Warner Bros. Rated R, with a running time of 100 minutes.