Horrible Boses Movie Review

A Movie Review By Joseph Hagen

Horrible Bosses has all the makings of a great summer film. There is the great cast featuring Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell. The premise itself is terrific—who hasn’t had a horrible boss and has briefly fantasized about their demise? There is even the promise of seeing the raunchy side of Jennifer Aniston. After watching weeks of amazingly hilarious trailers, I was anticipating this film to be the epitome of a laugh-out-loud, catchphrase worthy comedy. Unfortunately, Horrible Bosses is a mediocre film, in which all of the truly funny moments are shown in the previews. This film has zero heart and zero creativity. Pardon the pun, but Horrible Bosses should be more aptly named Horrible Movie (you knew that one was coming, right?).

Writer Michael Markowitz reduces very funny actors into less funny versions of the characters they have played in other shows. For example, Charlie Day plays a recycled version of the Charlie Kelly character he plays in the hilariously funny TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Jason Bateman basically plays Michael Bluth from Arrested Development, minus any heart and any humor. Jason Sudeikis rolls all of his SNL characters into one unlikable, womanizing, morally deprived jerk.

The bosses in the film are truly horrible, with Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell playing such ghastly characters that I would not have been surprised if they had each donned devil horns and carried around pitchforks. Although each are temporarily funny during their introductory scenes, their characters are written as such terrible human beings that it makes them completely non-relatable to any boss you have ever known. This is where the film misses the most. In the movie Office Space, Bill Lumbergh was a horrible boss, but his character was relatable to a boss that you may have had at some point in your working career. Lumbergh was fun to root against because of that relateability. Instead, these bad bosses are so over the top that their actions do not relate to anything anyone has ever seen, making them uninteresting and unfunny.

With a great cast wasted with horrible material, recycled ideas and terrible characters, Horrible Bosses is my first must-miss movie of the summer.

Memorable quote:
“We are taking murder advice from a guy that got busted for filming an Ethan Hawke movie?” – Kurt Buckman