iPad Round-Up 3 - HORRIBLE BOSSES

HORRIBLE BOSSES has a simple concept.  Three likeable guys have three heinous bosses. One is a coke-head arse; one is a nympho; and the other is an egomaniacal dick. And so, they hire a hit man to despatch them.  Of course it goes horribly wrong - cue capers, shenanigans and laughs. Only problem is, HORRIBLE BOSSES isn't funny - just embarrassing.  Directed by documentarian Seth Gordon (THE KING OF KONG, SHUT UP & SING) from a script by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan M Goldstein (all of whom have a background in sitcoms), the movie just never takes off.  And I'm not really sure why. After all, we know that the three likeable guys can be funny - Charlie Day (IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA), Jason Sudeikis (HALL PASS) and Jason Bateman (THE SWITCH).   I guess maybe it's the way the horrible bosses have been drawn and cast that lets the movie down.  Jennifer Aniston is a talented comedienne, as her time in FRIENDS proves, but by now her media personality as the dumped and slightly desperate ex-wife has started to colour how she comes across in film, and her performance as an aggressive nympho is just plain embarrassing. Kevin Spacey, serious man of the London stage, just can't do broad comedy as written in this film. And Colin Farrell as the cokehead just isn't given enough comedic material to work with. It's as though the writers thought that just giving him a comb-over was enough. 

HORRIBLE BOSSES was released in summer 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

FOUR CHRISTMASES - er..."mistletoe"?

FOUR CHRISTMASES is a piss-poor generic holiday season comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. I normally like Vaughn's motor-mouth humour and Reese Witherspoon was great in LEGALLY BLONDE but they struggle to keep this underwritten movie afloat. The jokes are too thin and too few - the "big message" too preachy and obvious - the whole enterprise such a blatant shake-down it made me ashamed to have colluded with it. The high concept is that Vaughn and Witherspoon think that they are a happy independent couple until they are guilted into visiting each of their parents one Christmas day. Naturally, the movie spends eighty minutes showing how "they fuck you up your mum and dad" before telling us that, actually, we should all be nice to our families, before then telling us, hey, it's okay to exclude them from major life events. Huh?

So this movie is crass and inconsistent. It's also poorly made - just look for those awful continuity errors with Witherspoon's wig. Frankly, the only mildly interesting thing in the whole flick was the Steve Wiebe cameo. Seriously, director Seth Gordon should go back to making docs than hiring himself out.

FOUR CHRISTMASES is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Iceland. It opens next weekend in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong and Poland. It opens on December 18th in Argentina, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Estonia. It opens on Christmas day in Belgium and Brazil and on New Year's Eve in France.