Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) are three working stiffs, each with a terrible boss. Nick’s boss is a soulless corporate sadist played by the always amazing Kevin Spacey. Colin Farrell plays the cokehead asshole who’s about to run Kurt’s beloved chemical company into the ground. Sweet Dale is forced to work under constant sexual harassment from Dr. Julia Harris, D.D.S., played by Jennifer Aniston. With the recession leaving few employment options, the three are pushed to the brink and come to the same conclusion: the bosses have to die.
After some bungling, the buddies run into Jaime Foxx who offers some tepid advice as their “murder consultant.” The three decide that to cover their tracks each will kill one of the other’s bosses. As they start gathering information to plan the murders, stupidity and hijinks alternate to spin the situation out of control. At times, I wondered how these three idiots managed to hold on to jobs long enough to endure these horrible bosses. And I realized that we would never get to the fun stuff when Nick, Kurt and Dale start to doubt they have the cojones to pull off cold-blooded homicide.
It’s great to see Jennifer Aniston break away from her usual goody-goody roles to play the sex crazed Dr. Julia. And there is no denying the lady looks spectacular in the classy lingerie she flaunts at every opportunity. But both the acting and the writing leave the character rather flat. Unlike Spacey’s sadistic control freak and Farrell’s selfish asshole, we don’t know what motivates Dr. Julia’s outrageous behavior. Is she trying to control through sex? Get affirmation? Is she just a clinical nymphomaniac? We never know. Whatever wasn’t in the script, Aniston didn’t provide on the screen to fill in the blanks. On the flip side, Aniston pulls off sexy but mostly plays it straight. She doesn’t seem, in this film, to have the comedic chops to push it as far as the comedy needed. I couldn’t help but think of the raunchy hilarity the role could have gone to in the hands of a Sarah Silverman or Christina Applegate.
Dale takes constant flak from his buddies. Obviously, a gorgeous woman constantly wanting to have sex with him is most any man’s dream. The writers try to play it off by making Dale sweetly devoted to his fiancé and, of course, men shouldn’t be sexually harassed any more than women should. But with the other two bosses brilliantly embracing strong stereotypes, I have to wonder why the filmmakers chose to go the less familiar route of the “female sexual harasser,” instead of throwing a woman into this buddy comedy and going with a male aggressor. It would have eliminated this distracting ambiguity and let us focus more on the delightful fun of plotting a well-deserved murder.
There’s always great joy in watching your fantasies played out on the big screen. But Horrible Bosses takes itself too seriously to get past issues of morality and practicality to get to the fun stuff, much less the funny.
Directed by Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses is rated “R.”
****
