Blogorium Review: Horrible Bosses

 Well, I didn't see The Change-Up, but I did watch another R-rated comedy featuring one Jason Bateman in it, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Horrible Bosses was the wiser choice. From everything I've heard about The Change-Up, another entry in the "body switching" comedy subgenre, I'll take a movie about three losers trying to kill their bosses any day. Nobody ends up with baby shit in their mouths in Horrible Bosses. That's not to say other, comparably awful things happen to our protagonists.

 Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), and Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) each have a serious problem: their bosses are pure evil. Dale, a dental assistant, is constantly sexually harassed by Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), a raging horndog that takes advantage of her patients and Arbus' unique situation as a "sex offender" to keep him in her employ. Since Dale is engaged, this is a problem. Kurt had it made at a chemical company until his boss Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) died suddenly, leaving his cokehead lothario son Bobby (Colin Farrell) in charge. Bobby wants to drain the company dry and skip town, ruining everything Kurt worked for. Nick has been toiling away under the tyrannical and sadistic Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) for eight years, hoping for a promotion that Harken ends up giving himself. They can't quit, and they can't stay. The only option that remains is to kill their bosses, but can they really pull it off?

 As essential to the story as Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day are, Horrible Bosses would be nothing without antagonists that lived up to the title, and it's really the bad guys who steal the show. Aniston is predatory, shameless, and works perfectly against Day's perpetually uncomfortable Dale*. Colin Farrell, hiding underneath a lousy combover, pot-belly, and goatee, doesn't get to do much as Bobby, but the artwork in his house more than makes up for the limited character. The star of the show, as it should be, is Kevin Spacey, playing the kind of sarcastic asshole that made him famous in films like The Ref, Swimming with Sharks and American Beauty. It's funny - I used to think that he was going to play that same type over and over again until I couldn't stand watching him, but after Horrible Bosses, I wondered why it was he stayed away from it for so long during the 2000s. He plays this kind of role better than anyone, bossing around spineless underlings, regarding them as something he'd find under his shoe in a dog park.

 Notable in a smaller role is Jamie Foxx as "Motherfucker" Jones, a shady character the guys hire as a "murder consultant." The revelations about who Jones is (and why he doesn't go by his first name), why he was in jail, and why he's willing to work so cheap are a consistent source of laughter during the second half of the film. Sudeikis is also hilarious as a guy who will sleep with almost anybody (including two major characters in the narrative) and has a habit of sticking things well, where the sun doesn't shine.

 Horrible Bosses doesn't aim to be high art; it's a crass, foul, borderline gross-out comedy along the lines of Bridesmaids. Director Seth Gordon (The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters) makes the jump from documentary to narrative features with relative ease, and screenwriters Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein keep things moving at a brisk pace. The stakes are set up clearly, the characters behave irrationally, and things go horribly wrong. I think you could guess that coming in, but the important part is that, like Bridesmaids, the film is very funny. The jokes are clever, the actors are all game to behave foolishly, and the R-rating isn't stretched to any point beyond letting you know this is a comedy for adults. In the case of Horrible Bosses, it's better to suggest what a person advertising "Wet works" does than go the extra mile and show it, and I'd argue that it's funnier for it. I've yet to hear the same for The Change-Up, which apparently didn't get that memo. Like I said, I think I chose wisely.




 * I don't mean to under-represent Charlie Day here, but if you've seen It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you have a really good idea of what kind of person Dale is. Like Spacey, he's very good at playing this type of lovable schmuck, and Dale Arbus is no exception.