Jennifer Aniston Bosses

Horrible Bosses is a dark comedy that is funny enough to be a hit, but criminally fails to make the most of a strong premise and capable cast. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day play three friends who all have bosses they’d like to see dead. So they try to murder them. It’s the three bosses who provide virtually all the laughs. Colin Farrell is entertainingly vicious as a sleazy, irresponsible cokehead who takes over a chemical company when his father (Donald Sutherland) keels over with a heart attack. Farrell’s plan is to trim down the organisation... by firing all the fat people. Jennifer Aniston has fun playing against her good-girl image, but never convinces as a nymphomaniac dentist who has her way with unconscious patients and can’t wait to seduce Day, her soon-to-be-married dental assistant. Kevin Spacey is, at first, the most enjoyably evil of the three as Bateman’s boss, playing a variation on the silky sadist he portrayed in Swimming With Sharks. But then the script squanders his talents by making him go too crazy to be even slightly believable. Sadly, screenwriters John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein and Michael Markowitz are not clever enough to take the plot in plausible or hilarious directions.

The three employees’ attempts to recruit hit-men (first Ioan Gruffudd, then Jamie Foxx) are preposterous. Two of the three leads are fatally unappealing. Sudeikis is repellent as a guy who thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Day’s dental assistant is such a nerdy nincompoop you wonder why on Earth Aniston’s dentist would put her career in jeopardy for him. The skilled comedian Bateman has the best moments, underplaying when all about him are going over the top. Elsewhere, however, director Seth Gordon (who demonstrated with Four Christmases how terrible he is at pace, style and structure) goes for way too much clumsy slapstick, when something more grounded in reality and social satire might have been funnier. One by-product of a recession is that it traps people in jobs they don’t like under bosses they can’t stand, so the idea behind the comedy should have been timely and cathartic. But there are the script constantly sacrifices wit, heart and plausibility in pursuit of cheap laughs and filthy banter.

Jennifer Aniston Bosses