Note to up-and-coming screenwriters: if you're writing a comedy, it's basically mandatory at this point that the big climax involves a crazy car chase.
Look, I don't like it any more than you do. It's not like you have to stick ultra-tight to the formula. It could be a crazy elephant chase instead, or a chase between two parked cars, where the good guys and whoever's chasing them (the bad guys could be gangsters, drug dealers, or possibly even hired killers -- the only limit is your imagination) sit behind the wheel making vroom-vroom noises while their buddies make gun fingers of pow-pow noises.
Hey, this is good stuff. I should be charging for it. You know what, send me five bucks. And if you're still not convinced, go see Horrible Bosses, which even manages to squeeze some humor out of the ol' late-act comic car chase.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Friends Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis have terrible bosses. Bateman's boss, Kevin Spacey, gave himself a promotion Bateman had been earning for years. Day's boss, Jennifer Aniston, is sexually harassing him to the point of threatening his engagement. And Sudeikis' company has just been taken over by Colin Farrell, who just wants to bleed the place dry and then snort an endless line of coke.
As their workplaces get even worse, the three friends decide the only way to restore their happiness is to kill their bosses. The only problem: they have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
The bosses in Horrible Bosses are cartoonishly evil. Farrell wants to fire a disabled guy because Farrell is creeped out by him. Spacey led Bateman to think he'd get a promotion just to make him work harder. I wouldn't be surprised if they hold meetings in their volcano lair to plot a way to permanently make puppies 50 percent less cute. This makes perfect sense, of course. If they weren't evil, you'd have to call the movie Horrible People Who Think Murder Is the Solution to Everything.
Which, if you've ever tried to apply for a California driver's license, it obviously is. But Horrible Bosses does a fine job working in the space between real life and "Hey, wait, all these people are so crazy they probably eat Glassy-O's for breakfast." Choosing to murder their bosses may not be a great idea, but the movie certainly brings you around to understanding why they'd try.
So sure, Horrible Bosses does its share of zany situational comedy, including the old "accidentally getting high on drugs" joke that's as old as the fossilized shells of ancient squid embedded high in the Rocky Mountains (catch How the Earth Was Made on Netflix now!). But a lot of the humor -- which is very consistent if not organ-burstingly hilarious -- comes from dialogue and character, mixing some genuine wit in with Aniston spraying Day's crotch with water. I prefer my brows of varying height.
The cast is pretty dang funny, too. The three villains chew so much scenery it's a wonder the entire film doesn't take place among a series of blank white walls. Bateman's reliability means he has roles in every comedy from this to a YouTube home video of a woman falling out of a bus, and it is excellent to see Day snag a substantial role in something besides It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He is a funny man who says funny things.
While I would have liked to see things skew a little darker, the movie I got instead was a solid comedy with steady jokes and unexpected turns. Horrible Bosses: not just for those who sometimes fantasize about going all Rambo across the office.
Grade: B
* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com. His fiction is available on Kindle, Nook, and through Smashwords.
