Very Crude But Often Amusing

Rating: 6/10 (28 December 2011)

Who hasn't had a job at some point in their lives which has included a horrible boss you'd rather just be rid of? That's the basic premise of "Horrible Bosses," in which three guys (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) decide they're fed up with their bosses (Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell) and decide to kill them, the only problem being that they don't have a clue how to go about doing that, so they hire a guy (Jamie Foxx, whose character's name is so crude that it probably can't even be included) to do it, except that he turns out to only want to advise them how to do it because his prison time was for illegally recording a movie in a theatre! If it sounds crazy, it is. It's a wild ride.
It's an extremely crude movie. Obscenities and sexual innuendo run rampant through the whole thing (surprisingly, perhaps, since actors like Bateman and Aniston generally have a more "wholesome" image.) To be honest I didn't buy Aniston in the role of the nymphomaniac dentist Julia, who's out to bed her dental assistant (Day.) Of course, all three bosses were over the top caricatures of the horrible boss, so that in addition to Aniston, Farrell's Pellit is a mean pothead who inherited the company from the father he couldn't stand, and Spacey's Harken is just plain mean toward the world and everyone in it. In addition to being extremely crude, this also includes a few very funny scenes. The one that really did get me laughing was watching the scene in which Harken (Spacey) goes into anaphylactic shock and Dale (Day) saves his life by stabbing him repeatedly in the heart with his epi-pen, while his pals look on and think he's actually committing the murder. Aside from that one scene, though, I would describe this as often amusing, but not really a spectacular comedy. (6/10)