Watching the tediously unfunny and sexist comedy, Horrible Bosses, it is hard to know who is worse, management or their employees.
There is not much to choose between the caricatured nymphomaniac dentist (Jennifer Aniston), a sadistic company president (Kevin Spacey) and a horny cocaine addict with pretensions to kung fu (Colin Farrell with a hideous comb over) and their odious under-achieving employees, Dale (Charlie Day), a dental nurse who is on the sex offenders’ register for urinating in a children’s playground, Nick (Jason Bateman), who expects to get promotion by supporting a boss who is mean to his staff and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), who is just plain lecherous – early on, he tries to chat up a parcel delivery girl and scores 11 on the creep-o-meter.
These guys, with no obvious connection to one another – writers Michael Markowitz, John Frances Daley and Jonathan Goldstein assume we don’t care; they are just three guys, as in The Hangover – trade horror stories and come up with a plan that no sensible person would carry out. Engage a lawyer to sue for harassment and mental torture? No, stupid, hire a hit man and expunge their sorry asses. By this time, any sensible viewer would be heading for the exit.
This premise is a mirthless straight jacket that pays lip service to Strangers on a Train and the Danny De Vito movie it inspired, Throw Momma from the Train.
The comedy “rule of three” (three guys, three movies about the same subject) does not yield much laughter here. The men hire a specialist in “wet work’” (a Welsh actor whose blushes I’ll spare) who turns out to be a damp squib. They hook up with a cool-looking guy (Jamie Foxx) with an unprintable name – just call him Jones – who scams them out of $5,000 for some advice they could get from a decent search engine. Ultimately, they have to do their own dirty work.
But how do you put a stop to Jennifer Aniston? Flop after flop and still she comes back. Scenes in which Kurt stalks her as part of a surveillance exercise are abruptly curtailed. You can imagine the poor scores at test screenings and the director Seth Gordon deciding it is one problem he couldn’t solve. And why is Aniston trying to reinvent herself as a vamp? She is a star whose asset (quite apart from hair and ageless looks) is comic frustration, expressed when dating guys who turn out to be jerks. If she wanted to critique her own persona, she would play a woman with low expectations instead of appearing in movies that inspire them.
Black comedy gets on a steadier footing when our three anti-heroes plot the demise of Farrell’s cokehead. After all, Farrell’s screen dad (Donald Sutherland) is an environmental saint; Farrell wants to bleed the company dry. Alas, this does not generate any laughs, rather a brief scene of violence committed by a character with scant motivation.
Finally, we have Spacey. If you have seen his ‘I’m gonna dish it out and you’re gonna take it” routine from Swimming with Sharks, you aren’t going to be surprised here.
Ends are tied up unsatisfactorily. Dale, Nick and Kurt incite murder and get away with it. Bob Newhart turns up at the end as a genuinely horrible boss – a Donald Trump type – and you wonder why he wasn’t there 90 minutes ago. I’m not sure he could have prevented the alarmingly stereotyped view of women as objects of desire or hungry for sex as presented here.
The title says it all: simply horrible.
