horrible bosses In a summer that has inundated audiences with heinous sequels and awful comic book adaptations, it's ironically refreshing that a film with the word "horrible" baked right into its title would end up being absolutely fantastic. Horrible Bosses is wryly hilarious from start to finish, a summer comedy that relishes the zany and ridiculous but approaches the madcap material with cleverness and wit. It's a big-joke comedy that is also in on the joke, a welcome respite from the onslaught of self-serious action duds and dingy hologram 3-D imagery. Perhaps labeling a film centered around pre-meditated murder "giddily infectious" is oxymoronic, but this one has a way of making a dark premise feel lighter than air.
I smiled during the film's opening sequence, and it gradually built to a sustained goofy chuckle that quite often gave way to deep belly laughs. Horrible Bosses builds a carefully controlled chaos that simultaneously lends believability to its high-wire premise and blunts the impact of its decidedly morbid implications. In a film centered around hate, there is nothing to be found but joy. A great deal of that joy can be credited to the cast, which is populated from headliners to cameos with unbelievable talent -- talent that is not merely brought on to mug for the camera and devour scenery, but which adds unique verve to even the smallest of moments. Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis play the three jaded souls at the center of the film, and Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell play their bosses, each of whom is so blisteringly appalling that...well, they deserve to die. And so our heroes hatch a plot to kill all three of them. Such a premise is dicey at best and disastrous at worst, but these actors develop such seamless chemistry, such fine-tuned rhythm, that all dangers fade away and we become instantly engaged with the resulting product of what seems to be the happiest movie set of the year.
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