Nerd Movie Reviews

Movie review: Horrible Bosses

Horribly mediocre.

Yet another raunchy rated R comedy hoping to score a seat on the success train that the Hangover powered and then later derailed, I guess.  Funny in parts, long and boring in others.  I guess I am tired of Hollywood not doing a lot of either really good or really bad films.  Best film I have seen in months was the Trollhunter, an independant.

Anyway, Horrible Bosses.  It tells the story of three employees who have good jobs ruined by bad bosses.  They are Dale, Nick, and Kurt, played by Kenny Sommerfield, Nick Hendricks, and Jason Sudeikis respectively but for the duration of this review I am going to call them Larry, Moe, and Curly for reasons that will be painfully obvious to anyone who watches this flick (Three Stooges image courtesy of the movie t shirt category).  Larry works as a dental hygienist who’s boss is a dentist so painfully hot she made my eyes water and is consistently sexually abusing him (which of us hasn’t had to deal with that, right guys?).  Moe is a white collar drone who is abused by his boss (played very well by Kevin Spacey).  Curly is an accountant at a chemical firm who’s boss dies and leaves the company to his drug addicted son.

Anyway, all three of them are terribly abused by their bosses and decide they need to kill them.  The go looking for a hit man at a bar they should have all been killed in and find “M-F-Er” Jones (Jamie Foxx).  He tells them they should each kill the others bosses to allay suspicion.  So, having decided that first degree murder is a reasonable solution for someone inconveniencing their lives, they start to plan it out.

At this point the movie, which had been kind of entertaining and had the potential to be decent, took a wrong turn and ended up in Stupidville, USA.  Ever see that episode of the Three Stooges where they break into someones house who turns out to be a Nazi spy?  Imagine that, but less funny.  Larry, Moe, and Curly start doing everything possible to avoid making an intelligent or well thought out move.  They run around the bosses houses, breaking stuff and leaving a laundry list of forensic evidence.  Other stooges-like hijinks ensue.  Unfunny recurring jokes are drummed on and on.  Kevin Spacey turns out to be even more evil than first portrayed.  The realities of living in the world and dealing with police (remember that cops can hold you for 48 hours without charging you for questioning?) or more or less ignored.  At one point Kevin Spacey rams his SUV into Moe’s Prius and then tells them he is going to frame them for something and claim they tried to kill him.  Really?  When any idiot could look at the two cars and figure out that you just tried to flatten them?  No chance of that plan backfiring on you.

Anyway, the stars.  The three main characters are reasonably funny.  One star.  Kevin Spacey.  One star.  Some funny lines and decent dialog.  One star.  The dentist (played by my dream woman Jeniffer Aniston, who decided to drive me even more crazy by going brunette) is super hot and doesn’t mind dressing skimpy.  In fact most of the women were very easy on the eyes.  Two stars.  Jaime Foxx was pretty damned good and dominated every scene he was in in a good way.  One star.  Donald Sutherland.  One star.  Total: six stars.

Now the black holes.  The movie and plot devices got really dumb after a while.  Two black holes.  All the boss characters were horribly (haw!) one dimensional, especially Kevin Spacey.  One black hole.  In spite of the fact that the bosses were one dimensionally evil, the fact that the protagonists were planning a capital crime to make their lives easier did nothing to make me sympathetic to them, nor did they do anything during the movie to change that.  I don’t really feel sympathy towards idiots.  One black hole.  The whole “super-hot-and-successful-chick-is-a-freak-and-feels-the-need-to-molest-a-wimpy-innocent-guy plot device is so asinine and infuriating that I wanted to punch out the theater manager on the way to my car.  It would have actually made the movie so much more tolerable and believable (as well as made me more sympathetic to their cause) if the person being sexually harassed were a woman by a male boss, not to mention add a nice diversity to the main cast (I guess they wanted to keep that Stooges dynamic rolling).  One black hole.  All the supporting characters except M-F-er Jones were moronic and annoying.  One black hole.  I can’t put my finger on what the problem was, but the pacing seemed really off.  It was like the movie had a 85 minute Act 1 setup, 13 minute Act 2 confrontation, and a 2 minute Act 3 resolution (thank you world wide web).  One black hole.  The resolution so reeked of deus ex machina that the main characters might as well have been trapped inside stasis pods.  One black hole.  And finally, if you are going to create a rated R comedy anyway for gods sake put some nudity in there somewhere.  Rated R for language is like going to prison for stealing socks.  If you are going to do the time, you might as well enjoy the crime. One black hole.  Total: nine black holes.

In the irksome category, I have a couple.  I don’t know what planet the script writers live on, but if on their alien world all it takes is five minutes to meet a married super hot model and convince her to have sex with you in a restroom I want to move there.  Same with super hot dentists willing to have sex with any stalker parked across their street.  Also, during the course of the film I thought of about 10 different ways the protagonists could have resolved their issues without resorting to murder.  I have to imagine at some point someone read the script before or during the production.

So a less than grand total of four black holes.  Entertaining enough, I suppose.  I had a free ticket so it didn’t cost me anything.  I don’t think I would have been happy spending money on it.  Wait for NetFlix, I guess.

By the way, I have fixed the issue with leaving comments but getting rid of that stupid capcha thing.  Just try to be human when you post something.  Thanks Cassady for pointing that out.

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