Horrible Bosses delivers on its title: the bosses in Seth Gordon’s first feature film since Four Christmases are so horrible that you’re grateful every time the camera turns away from their tyranny. Not all bad bosses abuse power, but those who do are fully represented here. There is the suave user, the sexual predator, and the drug-addled maniac, played, respectively — and at full throttle — by Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell. All of them will make you cringe in your seat, even the comely Ms Aniston — perhaps even mostly the comely Ms Aniston. Happily, the horribleness of the bosses is this film’s only realistic aspect. Otherwise, it is a compleat farce, a perfectly whipped soufflé whose bubbles lift and lighten material that would be as leaden as the bosses are horrible. Which is to say that the well-written script is acted with acrobatic precision. 

We have the three bosses, their three employees (who are old friends), a “murder consultant” (Jamie Foxx), a fiancé (Lindsay Sloane), a disembodied navigational system (Brian George), and a passel of supporting characters that includes a brief appearance by Donald Sutherland. We have a lot of dark sets and night-time shots, the overall taste of which is pretty dreary. (Among the outtakes played during the final credits is a hilariously naughty line: looking around the cokehead boss’s lair, Jason Sudeikis says, “It looks like Sharper Image took a shit in here.”) This is not the sunny Southern California to which anyone dreams of relocating, but a brown, gritty place with sky-grey offices and bronze-brown homes. At the start, the bad jobs are bad enough, but each one is made insupportably worse, and from this trauma emerges the conspiracy to murder the three bosses. Our boys know that they’re not capable of committing undetectable crimes, so they retain a series of hit men, both of whom prove to be disappointments. Homes are broken into, in search of “intel,” but the success of these missions is largely inadvertant, and when, in the most exciting scene in the film, one of the horrrible bosses shoots one of the other horrible bosses dead, the heroes have no idea that this deliverance was effected by their own sloppiness. Horrible Bosses ought to be unwatchable. 

But instead, it’s mesmerizing. Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis begin by establishing each of their characters as decent, level-headed guys who really do deserve to get ahead. This is key, because if we didn’t regard them as responsible men in search of flourishing environments, what followed would be annoying. Once they’ve got our sympathy, Nick, Dale and Kurt can embark on a desperate if ill-defined mission that has our complete support. When, as often happens to old friends under pressure, they regress “the eighth grade” (as Dale complains when the other two lock him out of the car so that they can think), we regress right along with them. They shout each other down, vacillate between bravado and timorousness, and largely forget not to leave fingerprints. Kurt, who for some reason thinks that he’s sexy, has a winning way of worrying just how rape-worthy he will be when he and his friends land in prison — specifically, more rapeworthy than Nick, or less? Dale can be counted on to act first and think later (“it sounds bad when you put it like that”) — and to raise his voice higher and higher to protest any criticism. Courtly by comparison, Nick has a spoilsport’s faith in the effectiveness of declining to participate in a scheme deemed hare-brained; he priggishly announces that he will “wait in the car.” These men are the polar opposite of masterminds. As we would undoubtedly be in their place. Although they sometimes do idiotic things, they’re not jerks, and we don’t laugh at them. We’ve see those horrible bosses! 

The bosses are horrible in very different ways. Kevin Spacey’s financial executive, Dave, is a leonine monster whose every move is considered and deliberate. He speaks the language of corporate uplift with the expressiveness of a diva singing Verdi, and we can see that he will always triumph over Nick, who has been slavishly doing his bidding for eight years in hopes of a promotion, because Dave doesn’t have a decent bone in his body. (His Achilles heel, which only their ineptitude brings within the conspirators range, is marital jealousy.) Jennifer Aniston plays Julia, a naughty dentist who is determined to deflower (so to speak) her assistant, Dale. (Dale, unfortunately, has been branded a sex offender because he was caught urinating in the middle of the night — and quite alone — near a playground. I would have tried to come up with a better reason why he can’t get another job.) Like Dave, Julia speaks with a thoroughgoing disingenuousness that makes rubbish of everything she says. (But bosses can declare that rubbish rules.) In one scene that amply showcases Ms Aniston’s comic talent, Julia threatens Dave while wearing nothing but panties and an unbuttoned lab coat; I can’t think of another actress who could have pulled this off without being more embarrassing than her character. Horrible boss that Julia is, her scenario remains a great deal more palatable than the more likely one — genders reversed — that twinkles behind her vamping. Unlike the other two horrors, Colin Farrell’s Bobby doesn’t waste time twisting the truth or manipulating egos. Utterly infantile, he barks preposterous commands with complete indifference to the difficulty of obeying them. But like his two costars, Mr Farrell gives a performance that is loaded with the sincerest self-parody. Strutting about with his regrettable comb-over and his surprisingly slight physique — is he really that little? — Mr Farrell howls through his scenes like a scowling Kabuki actor painted on a windblown kite. 

Horrible Bosses is a farce, but it is also a nightmare. It doesn’t so much come to an end as run one complete cycle; if it weren’t for the outtakes at the end, we might leave with an uncomfortable sense of its starting all over again. But nightmares of often quite farcical — once you leave the theatre of dreams.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.