'Horrible Bosses 2' - Review

Following on from the original hit 2011 movie, Horrible Bosses 2 sees Dale (Charlie Day), Kurt (Jason Bateman) and Nick (Jason Sudeikis) decide to jump-start their own business to avoid ever having to answer to authority again. Things go awry when a scheming investor and his son (Chris Pine and Christoph Waltz respectively) disrupt the trio’s plan, leading them to attempt a madcap kidnapping in the hope of recouping their losses.

Having not seen the original nor read any reviews of it, I had almost no expectations going into Horrible Bosses 2, so while they were somewhat exceeded, I can’t find it within myself to praise it too much for one simple reason: there’s a limit to how much leery, laddy humour I can take, even as a member of the straight white male audience. It’s the same problem I had with The Inbetweeners 2, but to a much larger extent because the latter had characters I’d gotten to know and even like a little.

The problem with the movie is not that it isn’t funny at all, because the opening twenty minutes are raucously funny, as are a number of moments towards the end. The issue is with the remaining 80 minutes, which range from laugh-free to gratingly irritating. Jokes about genitalia will get you so far, but once those in question are those of fourteen year-olds, you’ve lost me, as you have with the Jennifer Aniston character, of whom we shall hear more later.

Where the cast is concerned, Charlie Day is easily the funniest thing in the film, while Jason Sudeikis does the usual ‘shouting it makes it funnier’ campaign much to the visible annoyance of Bateman, who for all the world looks like someone praying for it all to be over so he can buy something nice with the hefty pay-check he no doubt received. Now we come to the crux of the problem: Jennifer Aniston as Julia; a dominating, sex-addicted boss who desperately seeks intimacy with Dale (Day), who constantly refuses her advances. This is a character that  - I think – is intended to revert the sexually predatory stereotypes, but in this case it doesn’t work because no man in his right mind would turn down Aniston’s character because, in the eye of the camera, she is everything the target audience is supposed to want.

Asides from Aniston as the walking bottom, the only other female characters are crazy, annoying or promptly thrown aside while the three leads continue with their lewd and crude conversations about ‘who you’d rather do’. The usually amiable Chris Pine plays the whole thing as drunk Captain Kirk and is frankly embarrassing, and one even wonders why they brought in the magisterial of Christoph Waltz for what is essentially a walk-on role.

While it may pass the laugh test for many, and the 110 minutes zip by surprisingly quickly, Horrible Bosses 2 is not one for the history books: the occasionally sharp script is hampered by an over-reliance on crude humour and misogyny, while the impressive cast swan about in their finery looking merely happy to be working, bored, or occasionally half asleep. Not horrible, just uneven and ultimately empty. 

★★☆☆☆