Three friends hate their jobs. That is the premise of Horrible Bosses, and it is also the whole of it. Nick wants a promotion. Dale wants to be left alone by his dentist. Kurt wants his dead boss’s son to stop wrecking the company. None of them quits. All of them decide to kill.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
The Promotion That Never Comes
Jason Bateman plays Nick Hendricks, an executive at a financial firm. His boss is Dave Harken, played by Kevin Spacey. Harken dangles a promotion for months and then takes it for himself. That is the whole of their relationship: a man in a suit promising something he never intends to hand over.
Bateman plays this the way he plays everything — flat, watchful, a man absorbing insults because the alternative is worse. It works because the script wrote the role for him. Michael Markowitz had Bateman in mind from the start.
Charlie Day is Dale Arbus, a dental assistant. Jennifer Aniston is Dr. Julia Harris, D.D.S., and she sexually harasses him. She threatens to tell his fiancée Stacy that they had sex unless he actually has sex with her. That is the trap, and it is the darkest thread in the film.
Aniston wore a brown wig for the part. She wanted to look unlike anything she had played before. Markowitz based Julia on a former boss of his own, who he said was “very sexually aggressive with everybody.” He also said the character “looked more like Cruella de Vil. It was like flirting with a cobweb.”
Kurt Buckman Loses the Only Good Boss
Jason Sudeikis plays Kurt Buckman, an account manager at a chemical company. His boss, Jack Pellit, is kind. Donald Sutherland plays him, and then Jack dies of a heart attack.
The company passes to Jack’s son Bobby, played by Colin Farrell. Bobby is arrogant and addicted to cocaine. His apathy and incompetence threaten the company’s future. The film’s press materials describe him as a “weaselly scion.”
Farrell contributed significantly to the character’s appearance. He suggested the comb-over, the pot belly, the affinity for Chinese dragons. He said Seth Gordon gave him “complete license to act as pathologically screwed up as possible.”
That is the film’s best idea: three bosses, three kinds of abuse. One is sadistic. One is predatory. One is merely stupid and high. The third is the funniest and the least frightening, which is a problem the movie never solves.
Motherfucker Jones and the Murder Consultant
Over drinks, Kurt jokes that life would improve if their bosses were dead. At first they hesitate. Then they agree.
They go looking for a hitman and find Dean “Motherfucker” Jones, played by Jamie Foxx. He is an ex-con. He offers to serve as their “murder consultant.” His advice: kill each other’s bosses, so nobody has an obvious motive, and make the deaths look like accidents.
It is a clean comic engine. Three men with no stomach for violence, a plan built on a technicality, and a consultant who is clearly making it up as he goes.
The plan immediately falls apart. The trio poke around Bobby’s house and Kurt steals his phone. Then they go to Harken’s house. Kurt and Nick go inside. Dale waits in the car as lookout.
Harken comes home and confronts Dale about littering. Then Harken has an allergic reaction to the peanut butter on the litter. Dale stabs him with an EpiPen to save his life. Nick and Kurt, inside, think Dale is stabbing Harken to death. They flee. Kurt drops Bobby’s phone in Harken’s bedroom.
The next night, Kurt watches Julia’s house. She seduces him and they have sex. Nick and Dale wait outside Bobby’s and Harken’s houses to commit the murders.
A Cast That Was Nearly Someone Else
Horrible Bosses spent six years in various states of pre-production. New Line Cinema bought Markowitz’s script in 2005. Actors cycled through. Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Matthew McConaughey, Ryan Reynolds, Dax Shepard, and Johnny Knoxville were all in negotiations at various points.
Tom Cruise, Bob Saget, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jeff Bridges were approached for Dave Harken. Kevin Spacey signed on in June 2010. Sudeikis was cast in May 2010. By then John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein had rewritten the script, and the film finally went into production.
Day got the part after his co-starring turn with Sudeikis in the 2010 film Going the Distance. Reuters reported that industry insiders thought Day overshadowed the main stars in that one.
You can feel the six years in the finished film. Not as polish. As compromise.
What the Numbers Say
- Runtime: 98 minutes
- Release date: July 8, 2011
- Premiere: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, June 30, 2011
- Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
- Worldwide gross: $209.8 million
- Metacritic: 57/100
- Sequel: Horrible Bosses 2, released November 26, 2014
- Tagline: “Ever wish your boss was dead?”
The Three Bosses, Ranked
The film lives or dies on its villains. Here they are, worst to best.
- Bobby Pellit. Colin Farrell under a comb-over, high on cocaine, running a chemical company into the ground. The performance is committed and the character is thin. He is a punchline with a dragon tattoo.
- Dave Harken. Kevin Spacey plays a psychopathic master manipulator. He is genuinely cruel, and the film does not know what to do with genuine cruelty. It keeps cutting away to jokes.
- Dr. Julia Harris. Aniston is the only one of the three having visible fun. The character sexually harasses Dale, and the movie treats her as a gag. But Aniston’s timing is the sharpest thing in the picture.
That ranking is also the film’s central flaw. The scariest boss gets the fewest laughs. The funniest boss is the one whose behavior should be the most serious.
Where the Plan Goes and What It Costs
The premise is a crime comedy. The execution is a farce that keeps tripping over its own stakes.
Nick, Kurt, and Dale are not killers. Every attempt they make turns into an accident, a misunderstanding, or a sex scene. The EpiPen sequence is built on a real detail — the peanut butter on the litter — and it pays off the setup cleanly.
What does not work is the length. Ninety-eight minutes is short for three separate boss plots, three separate murder attempts, a hitman subplot, and a police thread. Wendell Pierce shows up as Detective Hagan. P.J. Byrne plays Kenny Sommerfeld. Lindsay Sloane plays Stacey. Julie Bowen plays Rhonda Harken.
The film moves fast and leaves most of its own cast behind.
What Horrible Bosses Gets Right
The central joke lands. Work is bad. The people above you are worse. Quitting is not an option, so you fantasize about the only exit that feels final.
That is a real feeling, and the movie names it in its tagline: “Ever wish your boss was dead?” It is not a subtle question. It is an honest one.
The casting does most of the work. Bateman, Day, and Sudeikis have a rhythm together. Day’s shrill panic against Bateman’s deadpan against Sudeikis’s breezy confidence is a working comic machine. Foxx arrives late and steals the film anyway.
But the movie is not about anything past its premise. It sets up three kinds of workplace abuse — sadistic, sexual, and incompetent — and then treats all three as interchangeable fuel for a caper. Julia Harris sexually harasses Dale and the film plays her for laughs. Harken is a genuine menace and the film keeps him off screen. Bobby is a joke and the film gives him the most screen time.
The result is a comedy that is often funny and never quite sure what it is laughing at.
The Score on the Board
Horrible Bosses grossed $209.8 million worldwide. It got mixed reviews. It got a sequel three years later.
It is also a movie that spent six years in various states of pre-production and arrived as a collection of good scenes rather than a whole. The EpiPen sequence is the high point. The three-boss structure is not.
Aniston is doing something interesting and the script does not support her. Spacey is doing something genuinely dark and the edit keeps apologizing for him.
This is a film with a strong premise, a strong cast, and a weak spine. It is worth watching once, on a couch, with the expectation lowered to match.
5.7 of 10.
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