Horrible Bosses Review

The premise is a sitcom pitch and the plot runs on rails, hitting each beat of the swap-murders idea on schedule and resolving on a coincidence. What keeps it alive is casting. Spacey plays corporate sadism as something he enjoys rather than something he performs, Farrell disappears entirely under a comb-over and a paunch into a character with maybe eleven minutes of screen time and most of the film's biggest laughs, and Aniston attacks a part written as a leer with a commitment nobody expected from her.

Against them Bateman does his exact register of contained exasperation, Sudeikis is the confident idiot, and Day is the panic, which is a workable division of labour even when the writing hands them nothing. Jamie Foxx gets one running joke and lands it. The film is at its best in its smallest scenes, three men in a car failing to plan anything, and at its worst whenever the story asserts itself. It is not clever and it does not want to be. It is a well-cast machine for delivering the cast, and on that basis it works.