As a waiter, I once had a manager approach a table to castigate a young woman for having no palate because she sent back a moderately expensive bottle of wine without allowing it to breathe. While he might have been correct in his view of her assessment, he failed to notice her bald scalp wrapped beneath a fashionable silk scarf that bespoke chemotherapy. This made him rather insensitive and oblivious, but I’m not sure if I would categorize him as “horrible.”
For examples of horrible bosses – well, one horrible, one degenerate, and one nymphomaniac – please refer to Seth Gordon’s Horrible Bosses. Gordon, who previously directed the documentary / comic book King of Kong, has a fine cast to work with in Jason Batemen, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, and Jennifer Aniston, but there’s something that doesn’t quite work with this film.
It’s not horrible, it’s not bad, but it’s not great.
The premise is simple: Nick (Bateman), Kurt (Sudeikis), and Dale (Day) are trapped in jobs with less-than-stellar bosses. Dave Harken (Spacey) works Nick like a serf, prohibits him from seeing his dying Gam Gam, berates him for being (literally) two minutes late to work, steals his promotion, and forces him to drink three fingers of 18-year-old scotch at 8:15 in the morning. Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) is a friendly older gentleman who fosters a familial work environment; however, he dies within the first ten minutes of the film and his chemical company, for which Kurt is an accountant, passes to his cokehead, degenerate son Bobby (Farrell), whose idea of “trimming the fat” is firing obese people and increasing his company’s revenue is disposing of chemical waste by having black-market Bolivians bury it in cemeteries next to Nick’s Gam Gam – or so we’re led to believe. Dr. Julia Harris (Aniston) is a dentist with an insatiable sex drive, and while at work, she desires Dale’s (Day) “dong,” so much so that she tries to mount him on a patient and calls him into her office while she’s wearing only her doctor’s coat, black panties, and a pair of white heels.
Therefore, in an acknowledged nod to Strangers on a Train – and Throw Mama from the Train – the three out-of-luck employees solicit advice from Dean “MF” Jones (Foxx), the token black guy who must know how to murder someone because he “did a dime in prison.” To the film’s credit, they play this racial stereotype well, allowing the clan’s misconception to blow up in their faces slowly enough that it’s enjoyable, socially sardonic, and even a bit satirical.
And that is what the film does well. Horrible Bosses explores our occupational existence in the country’s current financial situation that finds the unemployment rate at 9.2%. While finding a job a few years ago was more of an option than a chore, current shortages in the job market further illuminate and tighten the nefarious tether to our sources of income. As Nick asserts in the first few frames of the film, “the key to success is taking shit,” but when the summit of the mountain of shit keeps getting farther and farther away, Nick and his brethren find there’s few other places to turn, unless they want to “turn into Kenny,” their Yale-graduate friend from high school who lost his job on Wall Street and turned to giving hand jobs in bar bathrooms.
Kenny’s inclusion is symbolic of the fears within all three of the protagonists. For Nick, Kenny represents a plummet in salary, going from next in line for the VP of Sales position to male prostitution. This situation also speaks to the lifestyle afforded by certain jobs and the difficulty of transitioning from one income bracket to another. In a society where value is often judged by possessions, Nick has fashioned a comfortable lifestyle for himself that would crumble if he were let go or abruptly quit. Compounding Nick’s fear is the leverage that Dave holds in a recessed economy: the all-powerful recommendation, a currency within the “who you know not what you know,” ultra-competitive job market. Despite Nick’s hard work, Dave is fully aware of his power and vows not to release a recommendation without the words “insubordinate” and “drunk,” so the best advice he can offer is for Nick to “settle in for the long haul.”
For Kurt, Kenny represents both a loss of comfort in his job as well as a slander to his libido. As an accountant for the Pellit Corporation, Kurt is happier under his former boss because there is little stress and the work environment is less driven by the bottom line and more driven toward compassion. While Bobby’s tactics to increase the company’s revenues are insensitive and ludicrous, he represents a traditional CEO who looks to crunch numbers and trim overhead to stay in the black. Is this an indictment on all contemporary CEOs? Probably not given Farrell’s hyperbolic performance as reprobate Bobby, but the transition here frightens Kurt more because it’s more than just adjusting to a new boss: it’s a change in lifestyle that requires him to evolve to a more contemporary business model – plus, it takes away the time he can spend out of his office hitting on “cute Fed Ex girls,” who are just place holders in his queue of women. Kurt, much like Julie Harris, is a sex junkie, guided solely by his phallic beacon that leads him to sleep with a handful of women in the final thirty minutes of the movie. Therefore, Kenny’s existence elides Kurt’s ability to find women, relegating him to sexual pleasure through homosexuality in restrooms. Since he “has always had a thing for his butt,” perhaps Kurt wouldn’t mind, but is this how he wants to emerge from the closet? Probably not.
Dale’s situation is a bit tricky in that his situation is a bit silly. A member of the registered sex offender list, Dale was previously arrested for indecent exposure while urinating in a playground at midnight, but in his defense, there were no kids, and there shouldn’t have been “a playground next to a bar.” Thus, the only job Dale can get is as a dental hygienist, and there isn’t much of a market for a sex-offender hygienist – except working for a severely horny boss. Throughout the film, Dale must constantly defend himself against the rather egregious, silly, and unrealistic charge, so Kenny represents the devolution to a legitimate sexual deviancy. At the same time, the need to constantly defend himself is what stymies Horrible Bosses.
Despite the often clever satire, Horrible Bosses isn’t funny. There are funny moments, but few of them are organic and don’t come from the narrative. Rather, they seem forced whether they are from the same cat jumping out of dark spaces three different times or the perpetual contact high that Dale gets from a box full of cocaine. While initially amusing, the joke died prior to unsuccessful attempts at resurrection. The same can be said for the recurrent “butt fetish” jokes aimed at Kurt, the laughs over the alliterate “Gam Gam,” Harris’ penchant for Dale’s penis, and Kurt’s need to interpret slang for the other two despite the fact that they constantly reassure him that they understand what’s being said.
All in all, this is an interesting look at personalities and interpretations of jobs in a less-than-stellar economy, but for a movie that promises laughs and doesn’t deliver; it seems ironically cruel to charge $13.
