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In his hilarious breakout documentary, .php>The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, director Seth Gordon took an arcade full of video game geeks and a scheming bully and turned them into a wildly entertaining film. If he could do that with real people, then it seems only natural that he could also take a cast full of seriously funny actors and crank out a wildly entertaining film. And, fortunately, he doesn’t disappoint with his new (fictional) comedy, Horrible Bosses.
Sure, it probably doesn’t take much to take stars like Jason Bateman, Kevin Spacey, and Jason Sudeikis and produce a side-splitting comedy. You could probably just put them on a sound stage with a couple of phone books and let them go nuts, and you’d still come up with something that’s worth shelling out 10 bucks to see. But a clever script doesn’t hurt, either.
Nick (Bateman), Kurt (Sudeikis), and Dale (Charlie Day) are constantly tormented by their evil bosses. Nick’s boss, Dave (Kevin Spacey), is a control freak who constantly makes him jump through hoops, only to pass him up for a much-deserved promotion. Kurt’s boss, Bobby (Colin Farrell), is a greedy cokehead who’s running his late father’s company into the ground. And Dale’s boss, Julia (Jennifer Aniston), is a hot dentist who sexually harasses him while their patients are sedated. Over drinks, the three fantasize about killing their bosses, but after they’re pushed too far, they actually decide to go through with it.
Of course, when you mix three lovably bumbling would-be killers, a paranoid psychotic, and a crazed cokehead, nothing goes quite as planned—and everything soon spins wildly out of control.
You might be surprised, though, to see just how it spins out of control. The story doesn’t go in the direction you might expect. Instead, just when you think you know what’s coming, the wacky comedy takes a surprisingly dark turn. And even though it seems to fizzle out a bit in the end (especially where Aniston’s Julia is involved), it’s a welcome twist on the same old hapless caper.
Really, though, Horrible Bosses is full of all kinds of surprises—like an ugly Colin Farrell with a bad comb-over or a nasty, foul-mouthed, dark-haired Jennifer Aniston. And while both roles are relatively small, Farrell is at his In Bruges best as Bobby, and Aniston somehow makes the role feel completely natural (unlike Natalie Portman’s awkward turn in No Strings Attached).
What isn’t surprising, however, is the rest of the cast. Spacey has always been oh-so-good at being oh-so-bad. And Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day make the perfect trio of beaten-down employees. Their delivery and comic timing couldn’t be better—and, despite playing blundering idiots, they still manage to make their characters (mostly) believable.
It may not be as over-the-top outrageous as, say, The Hangover, but Horrible Bosses is even better: a ridiculous but clever comedy that just about any average, hard-working schmoe can relate to. Forget The Hangover Part II. Horrible Bosses is the must-see comedy of the summer.
