Horrible Bosses

Directed by Seth Gordon

Starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Colin Ferrell, and Jamie Foxx

*** WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***

If tasked to write the review in a single sentence it would be: Horrible Bosses is essentially a 98-minute version of the trailer.

You walk into the theatre having seen two minutes of film featuring Nick (Jason Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day), and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) bitching about their bosses, making a pact to deep six them, and snooping around incompetently in effort to edge them out. You’re then treated to 96 more minutes of them doing exactly the same thing.

Nick’s boss Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) is a narcissistic, manipulative slave-driver who makes unreasonable demands of his employees, but that’s about as far as the misery goes. Threatening Dale’s engagement is “horrible” boss Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), a smoking hot, sexpot dentist who makes regular attempts to shag his brains out and walks around the office wearing nothing but a lab coat and the body God gave her. The newly appointed CEO of Kurt’s chemicals company is Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell), who sports a pot-belly and comb over, wears anime dragon shirts to work, does massive amounts of blow, and threatens to fire all the fat and crippled people in the office. In a nutshell, the most awesome boss ever.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s impossible to enjoy this movie if you’re not drunk. I remember approximately 25% of it, none of which was particularly funny, but all of the parts that I don’t remember were absolutely hysterical. In addition to providing a laugh track to a movie that sure needs one, booze is crucial in suspending your disbelief for certain glaring narrative deficiencies.

The first and most obvious being if your boss looks like Jennifer and also happens to have the sex drive of Gene Simmonds after a couple lines of cocaine laced with Mexican Viagra you’re not going to remain faithful to Lindsay Sloane. Don’t get me wrong, Lindsay is a really nice-looking Jewish girl and I would absolutely not kick her out of my bed… come to think of it I would probably even make her breakfast (like a nice omelet with Gruyère cheese, spring onions, and chives), go steady with her for a few months to a year, probably even introduce her to my mother – because let’s face it she’s a charming, successful young tsatskeh, has a cute voice, and grew up on Long Island and it takes a lot to impress my mother; she really doesn’t like most of the girls I date – and do the Sunday Times crossword with her in my gorilla t-shirt and big weekend underwear.

Hollywood sex offender

Okay, but here’s what I’m saying: Jennifer Aniston is a sexual tigress and I saw the outline of her boobs in this movie and it made my cock feel like a rocket that was about to blast off into outer space.

But that doesn’t even matter because the second humongous plot hole is that I’ve seen what female sex offenders look like and they don’t look like Jennifer Aniston. And this isn’t one of those discrepancies that you can fix with method acting or a bunch of makeup (like Colin Farrell does in this movie). Jennifer Aniston does not look like a sexual harassment lawsuit so much as someone who you’d just love to have sit on your face. They should have just gotten Charlie Sheen or Rosie O’Donnell to play this role because Charlie Day could be legit fearful of them and I could sit and drink and watch the movie without raising an eyebrow.

St. Albans, Vermont, sex offender

The second and third acts are a bit fuzzy for me except for 10-15 minutes of notes I had taken documenting the parts of the movie that Martyn missed. To his credit, this guy is a champion drinker but he has the bladder of a seven-year-old schoolgirl so usually needs to see a man about a horse during our boozy movie outings. This time he decides to have a smoke break as well (which I can only imagine compounds the hours of drinking we’ve been doing) and on his way back into the Cineplex he loses his bearings and stumbles drunkenly into the wrong movie theatre, up to another row H, falling over a few people on his way to seat 12 where he finds a pair of befuddled moviegoers (neither of whom are me) doubtless unimpressed by a 9 o’clock shadow drunk wearing an orange Samurai t-shirt I lent him earlier that afternoon. I imagine their conversation going like this:

Martyn: WHERE AM I? WHAT MOVIE IS THIS?

Moviegoer 1: This is Sarah’s Key. I think you’re in the wrong cinema, sir. Have you been drinking?

Martyn: Fuck beans. Is this the one with Jennifer Aniston and her tits?

Moviegoer 2: No. It stars Kristin Scott-Thomas but if you want to see her tits you need to refer back to Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. Juliette Binoche gets nudie in that one too and they both look pretty bangin’ for their age.

Martyn: Niiice.

Moviegoer 3 [one row behind]: Hey! Could you guys shut the fuck up? This movie is about the goddamn Holocaust. Have some respect, please guys.

Martyn: … Are you SURE Jennifer Aniston isn’t in this movie?

Luckily he found his way back, plopped down into his seat and immediately started laughing about his 15-minute absence.

Martyn: I WALKED INTO THE WRONG THEATRE AND TRIPPED OVER A BUNCH OF PEOPLE! BAAAHAHAHAHA!

Me: Dude, Kevin Spacey just Mozambiqued someone. This guy is fucking gangster!

Anyway, during this time Nick, Dale, and Kurt break into a house, witness a murder, flee the scene at high speeds in a Prius, get picked up and interrogated by the cops, and never drink four quid Pinot Grigio again. Okay, I’m reading over my notes and that last one was probably a note to myself, not about the movie. The main characters may have sworn off a particular grape variety halfway through the film but I can’t remember; the same way I can’t remember Bob Newhart being in this entire movie even though he apparently was.

Listen, if you’re going to see this movie you have to be ready to dig deep and find the consummate booze hound within yourself. There’s unfortunately no middle ground for this one.

Damage: 8/10 (pre-movie: three measures of whiskey and one pint of Guinness; during movie: 1¼ bottle of dirty supermarket Pinot Grigio)

Boozy rating: 6/10 (even whilst drunk you understand the movie would be no good if you were sober)

Next Week: Cowbows and Aliens