Bossypants

We live in the “…from hell” era of comedy these days. Teacher from hell? Bad Teacher with Cameron Diaz. Classmates from hell? Mean Girls with Lindsay Lohan. Cop from hell? Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nic Cage. Santa from hell? Bad Santa with Billy Bob Thornton. Everywhere you look in movies, some legitimate occupation is being made to look evil and sleazy.

Take Horrible Bosses, Seth Gordon’s black comedy about three guys trying to whack their slimebag employers. Murder fantasy is nothing new to cinema. The movie can’t help reminding us of similar murder-fantasy comedies of the past, such as Throw Mama from the Train or the ‘70s female empowerment flick Nine to Five.

In Nine to Five, it was Lily Tomlin (savvy), Jane Fonda (timid) and Dolly Parton (sexy) wanting to do in their chauvinist boss, Dabney Coleman. In Horrible Bosses, it’s Jason Bateman (dumb), Jason Sudeikis (dumber) and Charlie Day (dumberer) doing the plotting.

Cokehead boss Colin Farrell (with Jason Sudeikis) “trims the fat” in his office.

The main twist is nothing new: these guys can’t stomach the idea of committing murder themselves, so they hire a sleazy bar denizen with an unprintable name (Jamie Foxx) to be their hitman. Instead, he agrees to be their “murder consultant,” offering a solution straight out of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train: do each other’s murders. (We know we’re watching a meta comedy because the three would-be murderers mention the plot’s similarity to Strangers on a Train.)

Perhaps another twist that differentiates Horrible Bosses from other guy-centered comedies out there is its reliance on technology. Cell phones, iPad blackmail photos, GPS systems — all play a part in this murder plot gone awry.

You’ve got Colin Farrell as a scumbag cokehead boss (with a bad comb-over) whose cell phone ends up in the wrong house in the wrong hands; you’ve got Jennifer Aniston as a predatory dentist who tries to blackmail her rabbit-like dental assistant Dale (Day) into having sex with her by showing him compromising pics stored on her iPad — shot while he was under the gas during a dental procedure. Then you’ve got the GPS system of Kurt (Sudeikis), which plays a key role in wrapping up this comedy of less-than-brilliant males unhappy in the workplace.

In a way, the script (by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) flips the old feminist comedy Nine to Five on its head: those women were smart, efficient and worthy of promotion. These guys are hard workers, true, but basically too dumb to survive in a modern working environment that runs circles around them. No wonder they have to rely on electronic gadgets to solve their problems.

There are nods to the current economic decline. A former high school classmate who ended up working at Lehman Brothers — recently fired — is forced to give hand jobs in local bars to get by. Thus, the three stooges are reluctant to do the obvious — simply quit their jobs and work elsewhere — because they’re afraid of a weak job market.

Bateman does his bemused straight man bit (a carry-over from TV’s Arrested Development, which is currently shooting reunion episodes), while Day and Sudeikis resurrect their shtick from TV’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Day is the standout. If feral ‘80s standup Bobcat Goldthwait had an even more feral, runty little brother, it would be this guy. He plays perfectly off of Aniston’s maneater character (she’s well-cast, too; I wonder where she got the inspiration for her character… hmmm…), especially while refusing sexual favors on top of the prone body of his unconscious fiancée. The script goes to modern places that only today’s crude comedies dare: politically incorrect jibes (mostly uttered by Farrell’s pig boss), sleazy sexual come-ons (Aniston), homophobia, racism, misogyny. But it’s all for fun.

Kevin Spacey does an expert turn as the worst boss of all, a power junkie who leads Bateman on by dangling a promotion, then taking the job — and the salary — himself. Any rational person would quit the job at that point, tell his boss to eff off, but Bateman’s a milquetoast who can’t see past his own glass ceiling. (It’s interesting, too, that Spacey played a variation on this type of boss from hell in a more subtle black comedy from the ‘90s, Swimming with Sharks.)

Open-door policy: Jennifer Aniston (nibbling Charlie Day) plays an inappropriate dentist.

The technology that is essential to the plot is also essential to the construction of Horrible Bosses. What we have here is a rapid-fire joke machine, a string of funny lines meant to keep us from noticing the movie’s many improbabilities. (As in: surely blackmail would be a better solution than murder?) In the way that action films rely on an onslaught of explosions, gun blasts and car crashes, Horrible Bosses relies on a string of dick jokes and crude situations to mow down the audience. Delivered by a good cast with machine-gun timing, you can’t help but laugh, but you might also feel a bit bludgeoned. “Look at this place!” remarks Sudeikis while breaking and entering boss Farrell’s home. “It’s like a douchebag museum. It’s like we stepped inside the mind of an a**hole.”

Other bits play on the sexual harassment double standard. Like, it’s okay if it’s Demi Moore doing the mounting in Disclosure or it’s Jennifer Aniston with an open dental coat in Horrible Bosses, but not the other way around. Here, the three idiots trade notes about their horrible bosses:

BATEMAN: I’m such a sucker! Harken was never gonna promote me.

SUDEIKIS: That coked-up p**ck is gonna ruin Pellit Chemicals. He’s just gonna fire everybody.

DAY: She stood there with her breasts, right in my face!

BATEMAN: Yeah. You know, yours doesn’t sound that bad.

The film has done quite well, raking in $200 million worldwide, bringing to mind another recent guy-trio comedy with huge box office, The Hangover. While Horrible Bosses is marginally darker — contemplating murder — as with most comedies nowadays, it merely plays with the notion of badness, allowing audiences an escape from their own workplace anxieties, giving them something to chuckle over, safely, at the watercooler come Monday morning.