Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/30/11
Admit it. No, stop
looking over your shoulder and just admit it: whether it’s your immediate
supervisor, the guy above him or the head of the company, everybody’s got
a boss they can’t stand. Sure, you might not want to kill them, exactly,
but you also wouldn’t mind showing up at work and finding the object of
your animosity gone. As such, it’s amazing Horrible Bosses took
so long to happen: the notion of Strangers on a Train with
bosses is such a natural, it practically writes itself. Pity they
didn’t try that on a plot level, as the screenplay by Michael Markowitz,
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein starts falling apart early and
never entirely recovers, but one thing the new movie from King
of Kong director Seth Gordon knows how to do is be funny. In
fact, Horrible Bosses is probably the most laugh-out-loud hysterical
movie of the summer, and that goes a long way to paper over a whole lotta
plot issues and a few less-than-compelling performances. And it doesn’t
hurt that it’s about people plotting to off their bosses, not that anyone
actually wants to do that.
Times are tough for buddies
Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) and Charlie
Day (Dale Arbus). All are stuck in jobs they don’t care for working
for bosses who are tyrannical criminals. Nick has slaved away in
hopes of a promotion that his boss Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) gave to himself
with the extra incentive of threatening to ruin Nick’s good name and keep
him from getting another job in the field should he ever quit. Kurt
loved his job until his saintly boss (Donald Sutherland) died and left
the company to his son Bobby (Colin Farrell), whose plans to milk every
last dime out of the place and then shut it down includes taking substandard
overseas contracts he knows will kill people. And Dale isn’t just
sexually harassed by his dentist boss Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston),
he’s more or less raped by her and then blackmailed with evidence that
would ruin his marriage. For reasons somewhere between convoluted
and lazy, none of the guys feels he can quit without great personal cost,
and one night they hatch a drunken plan they may have seen in an old Alfred
Hitchcock (or perhaps Danny DeVito) movie: each will kill one of
the other’s bosses, and the randomness of the crimes will prevent them
from ever getting caught. They look for someone (OK, someone black)
at a seedy bar to teach them the criminal arts, and a guy they call (PROFANITY
ALERT!) “Motherfucker Jones” (Jamie Foxx) takes them up on the offer.
Soon the clueless threesome is plotting all manner of heinous crimes:
only thing is, before they can kill anybody, one of the bosses kills one
of the others, and evidence left at the scene implicates the guys.
Maybe they should have just quit after all…
Oddly, the way Horrible
Bosses abandons its original concept and becomes about the wage slaves
trying to avoid both the police and the murderous boss is actually its
best-scripted stuff: until then, it’s pretty much just an exercise
in getting the pieces in place for the pitch in whatever haphazard way
gets them there fastest. Seriously, why would we sympathize with
the heroes’ plots to commit murder because they don’t want to have to go
back to school to learn a new trade or, in Dale’s case, are a registered
sex offender because of a misunderstanding? And while Dave and Bobby
are legitimate fiends, the thing about Julia is that she’s certainly a
criminal of a type, but once you’ve laid it all flat that story thread
comes down to a guy wanting to murder a woman who’s way out of his league
for wanting to have sex with him. As Scooby Doo would say “Huh?”
So, the plot’s a train wreck
and Day and Sudeikis aren’t exactly putting on a thespian clinic, but MAN
this movie is funny! Bateman is at his slow-burn best, Ferrell is
absolutely shameless in a balding loser getup, and Foxx sensationally plays
along with the plot’s misdirection where MF Jones is concerned. A
scene where he reveals how he got his nickname and another where he explains
why he went to prison are not just the movie’s comic highlights, but among
the funniest scenes this year. I really liked the dynamic between
the three main characters, where Nick can’t count on Dale or Kurt not to
wander off at a key moment, randomly drop incriminating evidence or give
someone they’re trying to murder CPR.
Most comedies are not noted
for their great plots, which would be a lot easier to take if they were
actually funnier. Horrible Bosses is an absolute hoot, and
that patches over a lot of issues. And it probably wouldn’t be a
good idea for a movie to demonstrate successful strategies for murdering
your boss, not that anyone would actually want to do that. |
