I want to say right off the bat that I like this movie. I want that to be crystal clear because the review for it might seem like I don’t like it. So just to get that out of the way, the movie is pretty good, very enjoyable, and a solid B+…now let’s get into why I left disappointed. [Heavy spoilers ahead so stop reading if you haven’t seen it, but thanks for the traffic.]
The tantalizing premise of this movie (The Office meets Strangers on a Train) is that three guys are so fed up with their terrible bosses they decide to kill them. I don’t know if there’s a person in the country that hasn’t had a bad boss at one time or another (if you haven’t, maybe you are that shitty boss) so it has a tasty black comedy premise that made me really look forward to a little working class anarchy. The problem is roughly the same one in Bad Teacher and other recent black comedies in that the movie doesn’t go far enough. Unlike Bad Teacher, the three lead protagonists are extremely sympathetic–on what parallel universe could all star Jason Bateman not be?–and the movie works overtime to make them likable. It’s so worried we won’t find them likable that they never actually do anything bad.
That’s right, none of them actually kill their bosses. I won’t give away exactly what happens only that the plot works out very conveniently in the favor of the heroes…who are never allowed to be anything other than good guys.
What Works: Jason Bateman proves once again that he’s the most underrated leading man out there. Someone please give him his own vehicle. He also has a great chemistry with cohort Jason Sudekis (who could pass for Bateman’s hangdog cousin) and nemesis Kevin Spacey, proving he can still be a great horrible boss 15 years after Swimming with the Sharks and Glengary Glen Rose. The Bateman/Spacey boss plot line is the strongest and it’s a little disappointing that Bateman never properly gets a working class catharsis except in a hilarious fantasy sequence.
What Doesn’t Work: The Charlie Day/Jennifer Aniston boss plot line is the weakest. You just never feel remotely bad for him getting sexually harassed by a woman so clearly better than him. This is the plot of a thousand porno movies. Also, as much as I liked Colin Farrell as Sudekis’s shitty boss, he’s so cartoonishly awful–hookers and cocaine in his office–he almost seems fun. So only one of the three boss plotlines seems remotely believable and that’s just until Spacey becomes a total psycho in the last third. You can tell the script was really watered down by making the heroes more likable and the bosses more awful, and I feel like it really takes away from the material or any vicarious thrills the audience may get. Also, the ending is a cop out.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Had a different storyline in place of the Charlie Day/Jennifer Aniston one. Day is annoying as hell and cartoonish sexual harassment isn’t funny in an age when most of America–the ones lucky enough to have a job–work for a truly horrible boss. I would have modeled a more realistic boss/plotline off of the kind of boss most of us actually has: a tedious, greedy, spineless, idea-stealing man/woman that never takes credit for their awful ideas but does credit for your good ones.