Horrible Bosses

Movie chain Pathé has a weekly tradition every tuesday night called the sneak preview. They do a screening of a movie that hasn't come out yet for half the price of a regular movie ticket. Any movie. This can be to generate some buzz for a movie that the theater expects to be succesful, or a  movie that hasn't found distribution yet to generate enough buzz to warrant an opening at all.


It is a lot of fun, especially when you get to see great movies that tragically never find the big screen. In Februari, I got to see Tucker & Dale versus Evil, a movie that inexplicably has not been released to this day. I got the joy of watching half the audience leave during a showing of the schlocky Hobo with a Shotgun simply because it was too violent. One of my previous reviews, Attack the Block, also was a movie that was shown as a sneak preview.

What movie is shown, isn't announced. It's a surprise. It is possible to look on the internet what movie they'll show, but a big chunk of the audience doesn't do this, because the surprise is part of the fun. The people who go to the sneak previews are mostly movie buffs, cinephiles and geeks. When the movie title hits the screen, a lot of times you can hear the audience loudly groaning, and sometimes leave immediately, wich is what happened during Red Riding Hood. Sometimes the audience gets excited and cheers, something that happened during aforementioned Attack The Block.

Why? Well, they are movie enthusiasts, not a bunch of dumb people who just want to shove popcorn into their mouths and watch Transformers. And when the movie ends, often the audience gives a round of applause depending on wether they thought the movie was good or not. Why am I telling this story? Because when Horrible Bosses ended, the crowd gave this movie a goddamn standing ovation. It's hard to review a comedy. Trying to explain a joke is only ruins the joke. So when a theater filled with movie buffs and cinephiles cheered and clapped at a non-responsive screen, that felt like a pretty damn good review in and of itself.

Horrible Bosses tells the story of three poor schlubs whose daily life is torture thanks to their wretched bosses. Looking for a way to make their lifes less dreadful, and not willing to become unemployed during a recession, they make plans to kill of their bosses. Wackiness ensues, of course.

What makes this movie work is that every single character is extremely funny, and that the situations they get themselves involved in are even more hilarious. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day have great chemistry together and have the dynamics of a modern-day Three Stooges. Kevin Spacey plays his best awful boss since Swimming With Sharks (great movie if you can't get enough of Spacey acting like a prick, go check it out), Colin Farrell is such a sleazeball you'd wish he was in the movie more, Jennifer Aniston is as sexy as she is twisted, a choice I would not expect from someone who before only did really shitty romcoms. More Please! Jamie Foxx also has a brilliant cameo, as Motherfucker Jones, providing some of the biggest laughs of the movie.

The movie isn't perfect. The plot sometimes falls off the rails, with twists and turns that are as unlikely as they are silly. The movie clearly has its feet firmly planted in the realm of fiction, and if you are looking for something that at least has some tangential relationship to reality, this is not the movie. It is a silly movie. But a movie so incredibly funny you'll forgive it for being silly. In fact, the funniest bits of the movie are also the most unlikely ones.

So all I have left to say is go see it. A fantastic movie with an incredible cast, a great script and pitchperfect comedic timing. Only second to Bridesmaids in terms of comedy this year, and that is saying something.