Horrible Bosses Reviews (2011)

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There’s nothing quite like a bad job to make a life seem miserable. That gnawing realization, even in your time off, even in your dreams at night, that you will at some point soon be spending a solid eight or ten hours in a place that you hate with people you dislike, solely to make the pittance of money that allows you to partake of whatever hobby or substance that makes your non-work hours tolerable: we’ve all been there at some point. Luckily, Horrible Bosses is perhaps the perfect remedy for one of those too-short intervals between shitty job and fitful sleep: its bosses are more clownish than repellingly evil, its protagonists are relatable and likable, and it has a sharp script that play to the strengths of its stars. And while it pulls a few punches, it should be raunchy enough to wring laughs even out of those who’ve seen their fair share of recent R-rated comedies.

Establishing its premise with remarkable economy, Horrible Bosses introduces us to its six major characters as the credits roll out, starting with Nick (Jason Bateman), a sadsack salaryman angling for a promotion from his slave-driver superior, Jack Harken (Kevin Spacey). His circle of friends include Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), who’s dealing with a cokehead sleazeball of a boss (Colin Farrell) who’s only concerned with maximizing profits before running his chemical company into the ground, and Dale (Charlie Day), who puts up with the sexual harrassment of his boss Julia (Jennifer Aniston) only because he’s on a sex offenders list (but don’t worry, it’s the funny kind of sex offense!) and has understandable difficulty finding employment. One thing leads to another, and idle talk of how their lives would be better without their bosses around leads to the trio deciding to actually murder them, which of course leads to a fair amount of "three suburban guys stumbling around an assassination plot" jokes. It’s a lot of premise to go through, but again, it’s all spooled out fairly effectively in the first half-hour or so of screen time.

The storyline manipulations regarding these characters and how they not only are unable to leave their jobs, but in fact are compelled to murder their bosses, is all a bit sketchy and probably wouldn’t stand up to any close scrutiny, but if you’re wandering into this movie expecting an airtight plot or, indeed, any semblance of realism, you’re in the wrong theater. This is an R-rated joke delivery system, and luckily, those jokes are engagingly off-color, and the leads are all more than capable of delivering them with aplomb. After an early discussion about crime in a bar, Sudeikis’s character says “Speaking of entrapment, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go see that lady about her vagina!” In the hands of a more conventional douchebag actor (like, say, Colin Farrell), that might sound off-putting, but Sudeikis has the kind of smarmy cockhound wit (which he also displayed so well in Hall Pass) that makes it seem almost endearing. Bateman, in particular, has played this kind of world-weary everyman in almost every project I’ve seen him in, but he does it so goddamn well that it has yet to get even a little bit old. Day might be the weakest link among the three, relying more on volume than any kind of comic timing to wring out laughs from his lines, but he’s still reliably amusing, especially after getting a semi-accidental dose of cocaine.

The film wouldn’t work, though, if the bosses didn’t throw themselves into their roles, and each of them are up to the challenge: Spacey castigates his employees in front of each other and laughs in Bateman’s face when told about his dying grandmother; Farrell digs into his fatsuit and baldcap while telling Sudeikis to fire either “the cripple or the fatty;" and Aniston, especially, seems almost impossibly unselfconscious as she delivers lines like “you’re gonna fuck me in my slutty little mouth!” Her character is almost certain to make some viewers uncomfortable; her fixation on Day (who’s engaged and thus unable to take advantage of her advances) is more assumed than explained (surely she could pick up guys without having to worry about sexual harrassment lawsuits), and she comes across as less a sexually aggressive woman than the paragon of some screenwriter’s fantasy of an eternally cock-hungry slut.

That fits into Horrible Boss’s (mostly) admirable emphasis on being just a bit outside what you might expect from an R-rated comedy, though: given that these men are intent on committing crimes, the oh-so-riotous notion of prison rape is not only mentioned, but treated as a competition: “So you think you’re more rape-able than me?” If a line like that strikes you as off-putting, then you’ll probably want to give the movie a pass, but the bulk of it hits that fine point where an audience would find it laughably offensive without often crossing the line into just plain offensive. It’s a movie that relies on punchlines more than it does situations to drive its comedy, so it’s good that it has a sharp screenplay, and the trio of leads do a fine job of playing off each other’s strengths. Seth Gordon's direction is unobtrusive in a way that seems to work perfectly well for this kind of film, neither overshadowing nor underselling his actors' performances. He also had the good sense to cast some ringers in cameo roles, including Jamie Foxx, Donald Sutherland, and Ron White, although they each only get a couple of scenes apiece.

While Horrible Bosses might not quite deliver on its central premise, it deserves credit for at least not devolving into one of those “Wait, I just realized I love my wife!” schmaltzy endings that the Adam Sandlers of the world have repeatedly beaten us down with over the years. Even though it represents itself as being more outrė than it really is, it still sticks enough of its jokes to wring genuine laughs out of an audience, and even when it’s not outright hilarious, it coasts along on a nice wave of simple mirth. Your reaction will vary based on your tolerance for simple crudeness, but Horrible Bosses mixes in enough real humor into its vulgarity to warrant consideration as one of the better comedies of the year thus far.