“New crime. Same tools.” That is the tagline Warner Bros. Pictures put on Horrible Bosses 2, and it is a rare case of a marketing department telling the plain truth. The 2014 sequel reunites Nick, Kurt and Dale for another round of incompetent scheming, and it hands them the same tools: a bad plan, a borrowed crime, and a supporting cast doing more work than the script.
Sean Anders directed the film and wrote it with John Morris. It runs 108 minutes. It is a comedy, though the funniest thing about it is how closely it repeats the first film’s shape without earning the repetition.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. UK & Ireland.
A Shower Head Called the Shower Buddy
Three years after the first film, Nick Hendricks, Kurt Buckman and Dale Arbus have left the boss-and-employee grind behind. They invent a shower head inspired by a car wash, the “Shower Buddy,” and they think they have finally built something of their own.
Jason Bateman plays Nick, Jason Sudeikis plays Kurt, and Charlie Day plays Dale. Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey and Lindsay Sloane all return from the 2011 original. Chris Pine and Christoph Waltz join the cast as Rex Hanson and his father, Bert Hanson.
Bert and Rex approach the trio with an offer. Bert says he will invest if they can produce 100,000 units. The three take out a business loan, outfit a warehouse, hire staff, and hit the quota.
Then Bert backs out. He never signed an agreement, he tells them. And he goes further: when the trio cannot repay their $500,000 bank loan and the bank forecloses, he plans to buy their inventory at a knockdown price and sell the shower heads himself under a new name, the “Shower Pal.”
A Billionaire, a Handshake and a Bank Loan
That is the engine of the whole movie. A rich man takes a small business apart with paperwork, and the victims respond by committing a felony.
Nick, Kurt and Dale look for a legal way out. They visit Nick’s imprisoned former boss, Dave Harken, played again by Kevin Spacey. Harken tells them there is no feasible legal route to recover their losses.
So they resolve to kidnap Rex and hold him for ransom. They ask Dean “Motherfucker” Jones, Jamie Foxx’s returning character, for help. His advice is to keep the victim unconscious for the entire kidnapping.
The ransom note asks for $500,000. The number matters, because the plan does not survive contact with Rex.
Stealing Nitrous Oxide From Dr. Julia Harris
Before the kidnapping, the trio goes to the office of Dale’s former boss, Dr. Julia Harris, to steal nitrous oxide. Kurt and Dale nearly get caught by members of Julia’s sex addiction support group. Nick arrives and talks his way through it.
At Rex’s place, all three hide in a closet. Dale knocks them out with the gas by accident. They wake in the morning to find Rex gone. Back at the warehouse, Rex is tied up in the trunk of their own car.
Rex then explains what actually happened. He found them in his closet, worked out the plan, and staged his own kidnapping. He sent the ransom note to Bert himself and raised the demand to $5 million. When the trio hesitates, Rex threatens to go to the police if they back out.
Rex Hanson Takes Over the Crime
This is where Horrible Bosses 2 changes shape, and it is the only stretch of the film with any real momentum. Chris Pine’s Rex is not a victim. He is a volunteer, and he is better at the crime than the men who planned it.
The trio calls Bert to report the kidnapping and threatens to kill Rex if police get involved. The police do get involved anyway, led by Detective Hatcher, played by Jonathan Banks.
Set against the first film, the swap is stark. In 2011, the trio targeted bosses who had wronged them. In 2014, they target a man who wants in on the scheme. The sequel moves the crime from revenge to ambition, and the characters get smaller as the plot gets bigger.
| Element | Horrible Bosses (2011) | Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Not Anders | Sean Anders |
| Target | The trio’s bosses | Rex Hanson, son of an investor |
| Ransom demand | Not given here | $500,000, raised to $5 million |
| New cast | — | Chris Pine, Christoph Waltz |
| Returning cast | Bateman, Day, Sudeikis, Aniston, Foxx, Spacey, Sloane | Bateman, Day, Sudeikis, Aniston, Foxx, Spacey, Sloane |
| Premiere | — | London, November 12, 2014 |
| Release | — | November 26, 2014, Warner Bros. Pictures |
| Worldwide gross | — | $107.7 million |
Waltz and Pine Are Wasted on a Thin Script
The cast is the argument for watching this movie, and the cast is also the argument against it. Christoph Waltz plays Bert Hanson, a billionaire who screws over three strangers and then waits for the foreclosure. The role asks him to be smooth and cold, and he is, but the part has no room for anything else.
Chris Pine gets more to do. Rex’s reveal is the one scene where the film’s comic engine actually turns over, because Pine plays the character as delighted rather than desperate. He is having fun, and the movie briefly is too.
Jennifer Aniston returns as Julia Harris. Jamie Foxx returns as Motherfucker Jones. Kevin Spacey returns as Dave Harken, now behind bars, dispensing the advice that sends three grown men toward a kidnapping. Lindsay Sloane returns as Stacy Arbus. Jonathan Banks plays Detective Hatcher. Keegan-Michael Key plays Mike. Kelly Stables plays Rachel.
That is a lot of names for a movie that cannot find enough for them to do. Aniston’s Julia exists mainly to host the nitrous oxide theft and the support group near-miss. Foxx’s Jones exists to deliver one piece of advice. Spacey’s Harken exists to close the door on legality. Each of them is a tool the script picks up and puts down.
The Same Tools, Duller
The tagline promises the same tools, and the film delivers exactly that. The structure of Horrible Bosses 2 is the structure of Horrible Bosses: three men who cannot commit a crime competently, a target who deserves worse than he gets, and a scheme that collapses in stages. The sequel does not build on the first film. It re-runs it with a bigger ransom and a more expensive cast.
The kidnapping itself is the clearest evidence. The trio’s plan fails before it starts, because Rex out-thinks them from inside a closet. Then Rex takes over, raises the demand to $5 million, and the three nominal criminals become passengers in their own crime. A sequel that sidelines its leads this early is admitting it does not know what to do with them.
What the film does have is a clean comic premise. A billionaire uses a handshake deal to strip three inventors of their product, and the law offers them nothing. That is a real grievance, and the movie knows it.
But Horrible Bosses 2 does not follow that grievance anywhere. It treats the injustice as a launch pad and then spends the rest of its runtime on slapstick, gas canisters, and a hostage who is running the show. The anger that should drive the comedy gets dropped somewhere around the second act.
The film premiered in London on November 12, 2014, and Warner Bros. Pictures released it on November 26, 2014. It grossed $107.7 million and received mixed reviews. That commercial result is respectable for a mid-budget comedy. Box office is not the same thing as a good movie, and this one proves the gap.
The real failure is not the premise. It is the repetition. Anders and Morris wrote a sequel that gives the audience nothing new to remember. Pine and Waltz are the only fresh parts, and one of them is gone by the end of the scheme he hijacked.
Horrible Bosses 2 is a comedy that mistakes volume for energy and a returning cast for a joke. It has one good idea — Rex staging his own kidnapping — and it uses that idea to push its own stars off the screen. The second film has a paperwork problem, and paperwork is not funny, even when Christoph Waltz is holding the pen.
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