by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a DVD
I had recently picked up of the 2011 movie Horrible Bosses, the sort of mediocre movie that could have been
really great. It was directed by Seth Gordon from a committee-written script by
Michael Markowitz and John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein (for those
not up on Writers’ Guild etiquette, that means Markowitz wrote his first draft
solo and Daley and Goldstein teamed up to revise it), and it apparently was
enough of a success ($117,528,646 gross on an estimated budget of $35,000,000)
that a sequel is in the works. The plot centers around three drinking buddies,
all of whom are in uncomfortable work situations. Nick Hendricks (Jason
Bateman) has been sucking up to a fascistic martinet boss, Dave Harken (Kevin
Spacey), for 10 years in hopes of working up the corporate ladder (there’s no
clue about what the company he works for
actually does, as there is with the other two central characters), and he
laments his plight in an opening narration that’s one of the funniest parts of the
film: “I get to work before the sun comes up, and I leave long after it’s gone
down. I haven’t had sex in 6 months with someone other than myself. And the
only thing in my refrigerator is an old lime. Could be a kiwi, no way to tell.”
Nick’s on the point of getting a promotion to vice-president in charge of sales
when Harken, pissed at Nick for showing up two minutes late and trying to lie
that he was only one minute
late, decides to take on the sales position himself. Dale Arbus (Charlie Day)
is a dental assistant who’s being sexually harassed by the female dentist he
works for, Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) — one wonders whether someone on the
writing team deliberately picked these names because they’re similar to those
of people with intellectual cachet, actress Julie Harris (who just died a few
days ago) and photographer Diane Arbus — and he’s worried that his boss’s
amorous intentions towards him will break up his relationship with his fiancée
Stacy (Lindsay Sloane). He also can’t find another job because he’s a
registered sex offender; all he did was take out his dick to pee outdoors, but
the empty lot he chose to piss in was a playground and that was enough to run afoul of the sex police. The
third musketeer, Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis), actually likes his work situation at the Pellitt Chemical
Company, and he likes his boss — until said boss croaks of a heart attack in
the company parking lot and he’s replaced by his sex-crazed coke-addict son
Bobby Pellitt (an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell), who makes it clear to
everybody around that he’s going to milk the company for all the money he can
get out of it so he can continue his sex and cocaine binges.
The three hapless
young (or not-so-young) men — nerdy little Dale and O.K.-looking but not drop-dead
handsome Nick and Kurt — get together and start talking about knocking off
their bosses, and at one point they actually cite both Strangers on a Train and its spoof/remake, Throw Momma from the
Train, in hitting on the idea of
committing each others’ murders. Eventually they decide to hire a hit man, at
which they’re as inept as they are at everything else (one gets the impression
there’s a reason, even in pre-recession
times, these guys couldn’t get better jobs). The first guy they hire is someone
who advertised on a “men seeking men” Web site for “wet work,” though when he
comes to the hotel where they’ve arranged to meet him (and does a lot of James
Bond-style “business”) the first thing he does is lay down a rubber sheet on
the floor. It turns out he’s a hustler whose specialty is pissing on people
(though I’d never heard the term “wet work” before in connection with that
kink; the term I’ve heard is “golden showers”). The next guy is someone they go
to meet at a bar Nick’s “NavGuide” system (supposedly a navigation aid that
wires them to a call center in India, where their contact is named Atmanand but
has been assigned the name “Gregory,” but one which turns out to have NSA-style
Big Brother knowledge and influence over them) has recommended as the place
where they’re most likely to be car-jacked (this is taking place in L.A. and
the suburb of Riverside), where they meet up with a tough bartender and are
accosted by a man who calls himself “Mother Fucker” Jones (an
almost-as-unrecognizable as Farrell Jamie Foxx) because, as he explains, his
original given name is “Dean” and having the same name as the (human) star of The
Love Bug had less-than-zero street
cred in the ’hood. He takes $5,000 from them but only to be their “murder
consultant,” not to kill their bosses himself, and the plot proceeds from there
into incidents that are genuinely amusing but mostly nowhere nearly as funny as
the writers and director Gordon thought they were.
Through much of the film I
found myself wishing a genuine comic genius could have got hold of this premise
— what a movie Preston Sturges could have made around this concept! — until I
remembered that in the late 1970’s a genuine comic genius, Colin Higgins, did get hold of this premise and made Nine to Five, a brilliantly funny film that also centered
around three main characters (women instead of men) and an asshole boss (only
one, whom all the heroines work for) they’d like to see dead, but brought a
brilliant, anarchic energy to the concept and also did a lot more social
commentary on the whole idea of “work,” of why the people of a country that
celebrates “rugged individualism” and democratic freedom in the political and
social arena passively accept the regimentation and dictatorial control of
bosses in the workplace. Comparing Horrible Bosses to Nine to Five is a sobering lesson in how much the Zeitgeist has changed in the intervening 31 years, from an
era in which movies could at least play at criticizing capitalism to one in
which the system is sacrosanct and the people subjected to it realize that they
really have no alternative but to knuckle under and hope for the best. Even the
irony of having a woman sexually harass a man at work was already done (by
Right-wing author Michael Crichton in Disclosure), and it’s funny at first but the one joke in the
whole Dale-and-Julia plot line quickly wears out its welcome. Gordon and his
writers at least don’t fall into the trap of making their movie too dark —
though the transition of Kevin Spacey’s character from an ordinary nasty boss
to a figure almost literally from hell pushes the plot beyond credibility — and
though there are a few stray bits of social
comment they seem to have sneaked in almost unconsciously rather than actually
being thought out by the writers and director. I didn’t dislike Horrible
Bosses — though almost all the
comedy revolves around sex or raunch, that’s par for the course these days (and
at least this is one modern comedy where we’re not expected to laugh at people farting — though there
is an odd gag in which Kurt
decides to fuck himself in the ass with his boss’s toothbrush, for reasons none of the writers trouble to explain) — I actually
enjoyed it, but there were all too few scenes that made me laugh out loud, and
properly done, with some real imagination, this premise could have generated a
movie that would have had me falling on the floor.
