Movie review: Laughs keep 'Horrible Bosses' alive

If you’ve had a job, you’ve had a boss, and if you’ve had a boss you’ve probably had a beef.

But no matter how ugly things got, it’s unlikely that you plotted to have your boss killed. That’s one place, though hardly the only one, where “Horrible Bosses” drifts away from reality.

Who cares? While the premise is far-fetched and the plot at times ridiculous, there is enough comedic firepower in Seth Gordon’s film to carry you over the rough patches. With a cast that includes Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell, all of whom can be really funny, the laughs aren’t a surprise. What may be, to the uninitiated, is that Charlie Day, so great in TV’s “It’s Always Funny in Philadelphia,” is the funniest of the bunch.

Day plays Dale Arbus, a dental technician working for a hyper-sexual, foul-mouthed dentist (Jennifer Aniston, who delivers even the coarsest language with glee) who constantly harasses him. Dale is engaged and wants none of it, but as a registered sex offender (he urinated on an empty playground next to a bar one night), he’s afraid he can’t find other work.

His friend Nick Hendricks (Bateman) works for Dave Harken (Spacey), a mean-spirited sadist who belittles him (and everyone else) constantly. Their mutual pal Kurt Buckman (Sudeikis), meanwhile, has a great boss (Donald Sutherland) — until he dies, leaving the company in the hands of his coke-addled son, Bobby Pellitt (Farrell), who announces his plans to treat the family business as his personal ATM, then begins parading hookers in and out of the office while everyone else works.

Justifiable homicides, any of them? Probably not (and Nick and Kurt don’t have much sympathy for Dale). But murder is the route they choose, finding an ex-con (Jamie Foxx) whom they pay for advice, most of it specious. They spy on their targets, interact with them in various ways and in general bumble through every task they take on. Part of the premise, evidently, is that Kurt is a babe magnet, another place where “Bosses” becomes unmoored from reality. And again, who cares?

Let’s not pretend otherwise: The comedy here is profane, juvenile and silly. Some of it is also hilarious. Bateman remains good at the understated, can-this-be-happening-to-me delivery he used to such great effect on “Arrested Development.” Sudeikis is much better at plowing through the absurd with a smile than he was in the awful “Hall Pass.” But Day is great because he is unhinged. Sure, his Dale is a little reserved, but it doesn’t take much to get him — or Day — going.


If you’re going to skimp on plot and the character development isn’t much and you don’t have much in the way of a plausible ending going for you, what you’d better have is laughs. And “Horrible Bosses” has plenty.


source:http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20110706/APC0503/110706023/Movie-review-Laughs-keep-Horrible-Bosses-alive