Horrible Bosses – review

The Hangover guys' success may well have secured a green light for this occasionally amusing but mostly crude, charmless and misjudged comedy that veers between broad knockabout material and something aspiring to the more realistic, hyperobserved comedy style of TV's The Office. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day play Nick, Kurt and Dale, three amigos with one awful thing in common: they are each being victimised by their horrible bosses: a corporate bully (Kevin Spacey), a cokehead asshole (Colin Farrell with a comedy-fake combover) and a sex-pest dentist (Jennifer Aniston). Advised by an absurdly unconvincing tough guy (Jamie Foxx), they conceive a strangers-on-a-train plan to kill each others' bosses. The plot itself is chaotic, and not in an especially good way, and the tonal challenges and problems inherent in ultra-black comedy are not addressed. Perhaps inevitably, the three nasty bosses are far more interesting than our three dull heroes, but they are left undeveloped. I can actually imagine a whole movie starring Aniston in the creepy dentist role, which she relishes. There are some good lines. Foxx's villain is called Motherfucker Jones, a name he had to change from Dean Jones, because that was, embarrassingly, the name of the actor in The Love Bug.