“Horrible Bosses” should be titled “Criminally Insane Bosses.” Played by Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston, the title characters are so cartoonish in their venomous and freakish behavior that they tamper with the movie’s ability to establish a coherent storyline. The film has SNL characters for villains, and the guys plotting their demise are far too nice and cheerful to unlock dark comedic possibilities. It is often funny but illogical and oddly unsatisfying.
Nick (Jason Bateman, “The Switch-Up”) suffers under acerbic megalomaniac Harken (Kevin Spacey, “Casino Jack”). After the sudden death of his boss and mentor, Kurt (Jason Sudeikis, “Hall Pass”) has to answer to his boss’ son, a tubby, unwashed hedonist (Colin Farrell, “The Way Back”), who wants him to fire the company’s disabled employees. Dale (Charlie Day, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), an engaged dentist’s hygienist, feels violated by the sexual advances of his sadistic, saucy boss (Jennifer Aniston, “Just Go With It”).
Through a variety of threats of professional and personal ruin, the three bosses bend the three friends to their will. Desperate to escape, Nick, Kurt and Dale plot to have their bosses killed. They hire a hit man (Jamie Foxx, “Due Date”), really just be a murder consultant, who advises them on how to do away with the loathsome trio of workplace overlords. In their attempts to research their victims, the bumbling aspiring murderers set off a chain of events that show just how crazy their bosses can be.
The movie’s plot proves to be surprisingly complex, but most of the laughs, and there are a fair amount, come from sharp one-liners barely connected to the plot. The banter between the three bumbling friends is surprisingly strong. Sudeikis, a prolific actor never given anything to do, refreshingly has some of the best lines. Bateman just does his straight man routine. Director Seth Gordon (“Four Christmases”) wisely allots limited screen time to Day’s sometimes annoying comic persona. His exhaustingly manic shtick does not get irritating until the very end of the film. Spacey and Foxx, doing the not-so-tough black guy bit to perfection, are the movie’s best assets.
Unfortunately, “Horrible Bosses” walks an awkward line between unfettered dark comedy and a sunny, Hollywood-esque reluctance to truly go-for-broke. It opens promisingly with Bateman professing desire for money and promotion, but its heroes are no more insensitive and clueless than most Apatow men-children, plus they have stable jobs and people skills. By Hollywood comedy standards, they are eligible bachelors. They never make convincing potential killers. Besides Sudeikis, whose performance has a welcome modicum of smarminess, they are not craven or petty enough to anchor a supposedly daring and unnerving comedy about murder.
Spacey receives most of the deviousness duties, and he is a joy to behold. He has played the jerk boss before, most famously in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but he chews the scenery with aplomb. He starts out as a preening, sardonic icicle dripping with one-liners then gets more manic and crazy as the film progresses. He has fun. Unfortunately, Aniston and Farrell have perhaps too much fun. Their characters are completely devoid of humanity, while Spacey is at least given a tart wife to help viewers understand why he’s awful. Aniston and Farrell try so hard to play against type, to create the craziest characters possible, they fail to add any wit to already underwritten characters.
The film has a major logical problem from the outset: Gordon never shows the bosses interacting with anyone besides the three main characters. In “Heathers” (1988), a tonally similar dark comedy, showed how the hateful objects of anger inspired alternating worship, hatred and lust from an entire high school population. What do the female hygienists make of Aniston’s sexual voraciousness? Is there someone in Bateman’s office sycophantic enough to satisfy Spacey? By creating three different story threads, the filmmakers narrow the film’s comical possibilities.
Although the film’s innate decency hampers it from providing dark guilty pleasure, Gordon still allows the plot to spin out of control. It is fairly difficult to follow what is happening by the end of the film. Normally that would be fine, but “Horrible Bosses” fails to earn its surreal last half-hour. The bosses are totally nuts, but there is little zaniness to the film’s main characters or previous action. Entertaining though it is, “Horrible Bosses” will hold little comical resonance for moviegoers seeking a respite from their jerky bosses.