Horrible Bosses

Tweet

Review by Anthony Morris

Sometimes you have a great idea for a film, only to realise five minutes later that if you actually made the film you'd have to leave out everything that makes the idea great.

And other times you don't realise that until you've already started work, in which case you get Horrible Bosses.

It's easy to see how the idea got off the ground : as Homer Simpson once said, "Kill my boss? Dare I live out the American dream?".

Problem is – and this probably explains why the script had nine writers and took six years to get off the ground – making a comedy out of people setting out to commit pre-meditated murder is a little tricky.

This tries really hard, mind you, and having a trio of likable and very funny leads in Jason Bateman (a beat-down office-working chump terrorised by Kevin Spacey), Jason Sudeikis (a chemical company worker who's dream job becomes a nightmare when the bosses' cokehead son Colin Farrel takes over) and Charlie Day (a sweet, engaged dental technician constantly sexually harassed by a crazy Jennifer Aniston) is a good start.

But there’s so much set-up to put in place – the film has to establish three characters and their three horrible bosses – it takes a while before the story can even really start, and then the film isn't sure how silly to play things.

After one authentically funny moment where their decision to all just quit and risk unemployment is countered by the sudden arrival of a hilariously desperate unemployed friend, things again get bogged down in working out how they're going to bump off their bosses instead of getting on with the killing.

Which, being a Hollywood comedy that's totally afraid of the dark (dark comedy, that is), is never going to involve them actually pulling the trigger on anyone.

It doesn't matter how good your cast is – and this has a really good cast from top to bottom, including a great cameo from Jamie Fox as their murder mentor – if the script doesn't work.

Despite a handful of good scenes this spends too much time making sure we don't think the guys are killers and making sure they don’t actually kill anyone to take full advantage of revelling in what is, as Homer said, the American dream.

DVD Special Features

This turned out to be a surprise box office success, taking over $210M worldwide, so it's great to see so much effort has been put into the DVD.

Included here is a whole swag of DVD and Blu Ray Extras and Special Features including :

• Extended Cut Feature Film with 8 minutes of all new hilarious moments not seen in theatres

• Theatrical Cut Feature Film

• My Least Favorite Career

• Surviving A Horrible Boss

• Being Mean Is So Much Fun

• Deleted Scenes

• Making of the Horrible Bosses soundtrack

Conclusion: Movie 60% Extras: 75%