3 out of 5

Director: Seth Gordon

If you enjoy any of the principle male actors’ TV shows, you will laugh enough through this to justify a movie ticket. ‘Horrible Bosses’ is definitely of the modern breed of R-rated comedy, which taps into the slightly twisted willingness-to-get-weird that is exemplified by, say, Arrested Development, or It’s Always Sunny, or 30 Rock. Here we have 3 men in 3 very different professions (some type of high-stakes office work for Bateman, dental assistance for Day, and something dealing with waste disposal for Sudeikis) who found themselves working for bosses that they hate. They really hate. Enough to kill them…? And that concept is certainly enough fodder for a dark comedy. But where Horrible Bosses succeeds above other similar films is in its patience and willingness to tell the whole story. None of the jokes here are too surprising, but director Seth Gordon doesn’t dawdle too long on any one predictable sequence (finding a killer, planning the kills) for it to feel like the movie is mining for too much in too little, nor does the movie move too quickly into things – for its runtime, events feel properly spaced so that we get enough motivation to understand how things are for these characters. Admittedly, Day’s portion of the plot feels disconnected from the rest – just sort of a necessity to make this a 3-guy movie instead of a 2-guy movie – but all of the characters are so perfect in their roles that it doesn’t matter: every face you recognize brings with it a fun scene, so that you never glance at your watch in the hopes that they return to some other characters. Unrelated, I initially found Charlie’s sexually aggressive female boss to be an interesting spin on harassment, but then I thought about how difficult this would have been as a comedy had the boss been male and the employee been female. Anyhow: nothing new, but more spring to its step and thus more natural laughs than the majority of the bunch.