This revenge comedy for downtrodden employees everywhere promises more macabre humour than it ultimately delivers, writes TARA BRADY
A LEWD, DEFIANTLY infantile companion piece for Larry Crowne, Horrible Bossesresponds to recessionary times with dark wish fulfilment and a rallying cry for put-upon drones everywhere: Kill All Management.
Representing Hollywood’s new whiny masculinity, we find a triumvirate of malcontents.
Nick (Bateman), a corporate lackey to Kevin Spacey’s bullying executive, bites his tongue when he gets the hairdryer effect for arriving at 6.02am or when he’s ridiculed into drinking at 11am. All he has to do is keep his head down until his long-awaited promotion comes through. And then it doesn’t.
His dumber friend Dale (Day) has an even worse time of it. A dental assistant who can’t wait to marry his fiancee, he’s persistently tormented and preyed upon by his superior, a dirty-mouthed molester played by Jennifer Aniston. The third pal, Kurt (Sudeikis) gets along famously with his boss. It’s the old man’s coke-snorting, whore-using, spoiled-rotten heir (Colin Farrell) that he’d like to see the back of.
All it takes is one drunken evening and some distant recollections of seeing Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train– or was it Throw Momma from the Train?– for the gang to hatch a plan to kill each others' bosses. Bungling soon ensues.
Jollied along by casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, and wheelchair jokes, Horrible Bossesis sporadically funny in its own horrible way. (After all, isms don't count if you're laughing hard enough).
Overall, however, the material is rarely equal to the fine cast. Muddled plotting and an uneven tone ensure that the film’s colourful coterie of cartoonish subsidiary characters deserve much higher billing than the central troika.
Farrell, in particular, deserves a sleazy spin-off prequel. His old chum, Jamie Foxx, is equally fun as Motherfucker Jones, a barfly the chaps mistake as a hardened killer on account of his ethnicity.
Conversely, Jason Bateman, though always a pleasure, is rather hampered by the companionship of Day and Sudeikis.
It's not that these fellows can't deliver a zinger with decent timing; it's just that they're rather overshadowed by their A-list co-stars and ill-defined characterisation. The results of their combined efforts are hardly a waste of space but don't quite amount to this year's Office Spaceeither.
