Cinema 2011 #74: Horrible Bosses

A really great premise – 9 to 5 meets (a name-checked) Strangers on a Train – and some decent comedic performances get squandered in director Seth Gordon’s homicidal workplace comedy that simply isn’t wicked enough to be truly deadly.

Three put upon drones (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) working in Los Angeles really hate their bosses, and not without reason; Bateman’s corporate dogsbody Nick is devotedly on the leash of all round business bastard Dave Harken, a Kevin Spacey treading water in a watered down version of his Swimming with Sharks Svengali, in the hope of getting a promotion. Day’s dental nurse Dale, unemployable anywhere else, is subjected daily to hostile sexual harassment courtesy of nympho cougar Jenifer Aniston’s diabolical dentist.  While Sudeikis’ sex-addicted accountant Kurt, unwilling to let his workplace go to the dogs, suffers from the paranoiac whims of Colin Farrell’s coke-addicted heir to the chemical plant Donald Sutherland’s cameo death leaves behind. 

But quitting isn’t really an option for the three in a dwindling economy where Ivy League graduates resort to jacking off strangers in the jacks to make ends meet. Instead, they opt for a criss-cross conspiracy to commit murder, and decide to off each other’s bosses in true Hitchcockian style. To do so, they’ll first have to seek the advice of murder consultant Motherfucker Jones, a game but underdeveloped Jamie Foxx, and try to get over their middle-class fears to follow through on their murderous intent.

He really wanted his Sellotape dispenser back

The acting is generally decent, with the bosses having far more to play with than their subjugated lackeys. Spacey can do this sort of slime ball in his sleep, but still manages to steal most of the scenes he’s in against the-ever-the-straight-man Bateman. Aniston, hilarious as the sexed-up DDS, brazenly hides Rachel and every all-American romcom role she’s played in the last decade far beneath a layer of smut, although were the shoe on the other gender’s foot, her rapist dentist would not be quite so chucklesome.

Day, relatively unknown on these shores, has great fun at the expense of sex abuse victims everywhere. Sudeikis continues to shine, growing steadily into a fine feature actor and making 2011 a break-out year for audience’s unfamiliar with his SNL characters, and Colin Farrell is unrecognisable and criminally wasted in only a few short scenes displaying his fine talents as a comedic star.

The problems, however, come from a script that plays it too safe, with the characters played rather simply as black and white and covered over by cheap gross-out humour laughs. We’re only offered brief glimpses at the trio’s workplace woes, and frankly their situations, while not enviable, don’t really seem despicable enough to merit doing in their dickhead bosses. Add to this a rather rushed, and annoyingly neat and easy, ending that doesn’t satisfactorily manage to tie up loose ends, and Gordon’s film comes across as a bit shoddy, but saved from the firing squad by an eager cast.

3 Likes.

General Release: July 22nd

Runtime: 98 mins

Certificate: 15a