American movies are dead and I’m attending the funeral. It’ll be a long-running funeral, I expect, with services that go on for years and years and years, and I’ll be there for most of ’em. My beloved movies! After so many years of devotion, it’s the least I can do—go look at the embalmed corpses at the cineplex. This week’s cadaver: Horrible Bosses.
Horrible Bosses is a weak, slack, sloppy, lazy mess of a movie about three middle-class white guys (played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day) who decide to kill their monstrous employers. Technically and aesthetically, it’s so blah it doesn’t really need to be a movie at all, really. It could be a series of Saturday Night Live skits, or a community theater comedy, or a comic strip. It just happens to be a movie, that’s all. Written by TV guys, as it happens: Michael Markowitz, (producer of Becker), John Francis Daley (actor on House and Freaks and Geeks), and Jonathan Goldstein (writer/producer of Shit my Dad Says). And directed by some shmoe named Seth Gordon (Four Christmases plus a lot of TV) who knows enough to say “Action,” and “Cut” and laugh appreciatively at his actors’ ad-libbing, but no more. I assume the DP took care of keeping the camera pointed at the actors while they said lines, more or less. That’s the kind of movie it is.
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