Film Friday: Horrible Bosses (2011)

Lately, we’ve been talking about the dearth of good comedies in the modern era. It seems that most modern comedies are gross rather than funny, dull rather than clever, and generally generic. I had little hope for Horrible Bosses. Imagine my surprise to find a truly enjoyable film.

** spoiler alert **

Horrible Bosses is the story of three disgruntled employees, Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day), who decide they want their bosses dead. Eventually, in an homage to Hitchcock’s Strangers on A Train, they decide that the only way to make this happen, and to not get caught, is if they kill each other’s bosses. But there’s a problem. . . they’re idiots. And soon the hunters become the hunted.

This film works for a variety of reasons, each of which is generally missing in the comedies of people like Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow. Specifically, you have well-drawn characters, a tight script, and clever social commentary.

● Well-Drawn Characters: One of the first things you notice in Bosses is the great characters. What makes them stand out from other modern comedies is that they are all unique. For example, Nick, Kurt and Dale each have different personalities, see their jobs differently, and have different driving motivations (money, love, public good). Yet, they have formed an enduring friendship, which the actors sell through the way they interact, particularly the use of careful comedic timing to fire lines back and forth and thereby show they have known each other for years. Good luck finding that in an Apatow film, where the relationships are distant.

But the real treat is the bosses. Kevin Spacey plays Nick’s boss Dave Harken. He exploits his employees with promises he’ll never keep and with threats. He’s abusive and angry and jealous of anyone who gets near his wife. Spacey plays this character like he played the hateful Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks, only he adds an element of maniacal joy to his evil. This makes you enjoy hating him rather than just hating him. He also gives the character just enough of a God-complex to make his over-the-top actions entirely believable.

Colin Farrell plays Bobby Pellit, a drug-abusing, power-abusing, paranoid slimeball wannabe, who inherits a great company and decides to run it into the ground because he hated his father and because he’s paranoid that others look down on him. He’s the kind of guy who has a wall-sized portrait of himself doing martial arts. Like Spacey, Farrell makes the character believable by adding just enough hints of paranoia and self-doubt behind his eyes to let you know why this guy really would act this way.

Finally, you have Jennifer Aniston, as uber-cougar Dentist Julia Harris. What she does so perfectly here is to put on a hard-sell seduction of Dale, which would frankly work on any man, and then add a little touch in each scene to make it uncomfortable. It’s in those moments of discomfort that you see her insanity and where everything she does becomes believable. She is essentially completely out of control.

These characters are all funny and believable. They all have unique traits, which broadens the variety of jokes available. Also, the good guys are good, unlike in a Rogen film, and they aren’t unmotivated and pathetic, like in an Apatow film, so you genuinely cheer for them against the bad guys.

● Tight Script: This leads us to the second point: the tight script. One of the biggest problems with modern comedies is sloppy scripts with characters doing things which make no sense and unrelated gags strewn throughout the film. None of that is true here. For one thing, there’s no filler. Everything any of the characters does is designed to show you some aspect of their personality which explains their future actions. And everything these characters do makes sense. For example, the heroes don’t just decide to kill their bosses because the script calls for it, they are pushed into it when their bosses attack things which are dear to them and make it clear they will continue to harm them in the future, AND their alternatives are taken away. Even then, they act reluctantly because they just aren’t killers.

Further, nothing in this film comes out of the blue because everything is foreshadowed. And the crazier the event, the greater the foreshadowing, with the craziest moments being foreshadowed at least twice. For example, toward the end, it becomes important that their On-Star-like system can hear what is being said in the car. Before this happens, however, you are shown twice how this works with conversations with the On-Star service rep. Thus, when this moment arrives, you don’t have any problems accepting it. Similarly, another character is distracted by an attractive woman at a critical moment. While this may seem difficult to believe under normal conditions, you’ve actually seen this character get similarly distracted twice before and you’ve been told how this woman fools around. Again, this means you never once doubt what happens. Compare this with Apatow and Rogen films where events occur seemingly randomly and without any warning.

Also unlike Rogen and Apatow, this script rarely sinks to sex jokes or gross-out jokes. And the few times it does, the jokes are understated, leaving much to the imagination, and it always has a purpose, i.e. it will become relevant before the film ends.

● Clever Social Commentary: Finally, this film takes swipes at liberal sacred cows. For example, the three heroes want to find a hired killer, so they go to a bar in a black neighborhood. They don’t think of themselves as racist, but the racism is obvious in their assumption that murderers would most likely be found at a black bar. When the bartender reacts poorly to the suggestion that all black people must be criminals, they try to use standard liberal talking points about tolerance and oppression to talk their way out of it by suggesting they see “you people” as victims. To this, the bartender angrily retorts that he’s a small business man. The liberals are stumped. But their liberal stupidity has drawn the attention of Dean “Motherf*cker” Jones (Jamie Foxx), who exploits the prejudice they didn’t believe they had.

There are also jokes about Priuses versus SUVs, they make light of sexual harassment and anal sex in prisons, and there is a funny moment about how useless it is to force someone who is intent on killing you to keep their firearms in a locked case. . . it doesn’t prevent anything. These joke aim directly at the flaws inherent in these liberal ideas, flaws which politically correct liberals pretend don’t exist. Naturally, for doing this, writer Markowitz got hammered for being racist, homophobic and misogynistic. But the joke was ultimately on the critics, as the film broke records on its way to making $209 million worldwide.

This film has much going for it, especially compared to recent comedies. Is it the greatest comedy ever? Hardly. Is it better than Ghostbusters or Night At The Opera? Nope. But it shows that buddy comedies can still be funny, and it does that by giving us unique, likeable and hate-able characters, by giving us a solid script with zero waste or padding, by poking fun at things Hollywood normally won’t touch, and without making us watch characters trade bodily fluids for humor. Bravo.