Starring: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston
Director: Seth Gordon
Rating: 4/5
If there’s one thing we have to thank The Hangover for, it’s that it making several truck loads of cash let studios go big with raunchy, sweary comedies like never before. And that’s one thing we can all get behind.
Next on the bandwagon comes Horrible Bosses, the latest to try and combine cursing with large amounts of currency.
Horrible Bosses deals with exactly that, showing us Nick, Kurt and Dale (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day), three guys struggling to deal with, as the title says, horrible bosses.
Nick’s boss Jack (Kevin Spacey) is a power mad psycho, Kurt’s boss Bobby (Colin Farrell) is a drug addled idiot and Kurt’s boss Julia (Jennifer Aniston) has forgotten the term ‘sexual harassment.’
With their lives being made a living hell, the trio decide to bump off their bosses, deciding life would be so much easier with them no longer around. Unsurprisingly, they may have a little trouble pulling off the perfect triple homicide though.
The key of any comedy is good, relatable, funny protagonists. Horrible Bosses has three. Nick, Kurt and Dale are all great centre pieces and while they may fall into comedy tropes, they have more than enough charm to pull them through.
Bateman, Sudeikis and Day all bring their a-game and while at more than one point I was expecting a Three Stooges title card to pop up, these three have a great chemistry on screen.
The bosses are also fantastically comical too. Hideously over the top monsters, Spacey’s megalomaniac in particular makes for a fantastic villain.
All he needed was a handlebar moustache and he’d be perfect. Not take away from the other two, as both Aniston and Farrell appear to be having a whale of a time, but Spacey nearly steals the whole show.
This is all underscored by a really funny, rude and lewd script. Although the occasional joke may hop the boundaries of taste every now and again, the success rate is still way higher than average.
It may pull a few punches towards the end, but this is a genuinely funny film, and defiantly makes the use of some fantastically colourful wordplay.
Horrible Bosses may not be very clever, deep or overly meaningful, but it’s a crude, exceptionally witty comedy that delivers consistent laughs throughout with some great characters and superb lines that easily give it a promotion to the top table of this year’s funny flicks.
Horrible Bosses is out now
FemaleFirst Cameron Smith
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