HORRIBLE BOSSES

HORRIBLE BOSSES (Rated R for pervasive, harsh profanity, abundant graphic & vulgar dialog and sexual innuendo):  Whenever I see a movie created in the mold of a Judd Apetow epater les bourgeois  comedy, I wonder whether or not it has been made by people who actually think it's funny or if they know it's a sure bet to make money off people who accept it as funny.

By contrast, I think of the humor of Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges, who created hilarious situations over & over again without once resorting to the juvenile practice of seeing something prurient, sexual, dirty, or vulgar in any act, object, movement, or person.  It was Freud who referred to such dissolute compulsion as a Rachel complex; something he suggested as being only an occasional aberration now runs unchecked in Hollywood - and I, for one, am tired of it.

Meanwhile back at the raunch - the plot, in case you haven't already been exposed to it, is about three boy/men (who appear as either male or female in almost all sex-compulsive flicks), friends since high school (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudikis, Charlie Day), labor in jobs under intolerable bosses (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston).  Our boys plan to murder them.  There's only one problem: they bumble about in slapstick idiocy, failing one attempt after another, taking side tracks into sexual situations, until we begin to wonder about their individual worth. 

Written by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein - all veterans of commercial TV writing - and directed by Seth Gordon ("Four Christmases"), the basic script has all the potentials of a good slapstick comedy, and except for its ongoing juvenile vulgarity, might make an hour and a half of amusing entertainment.  The talent is noteworthy; the trio of men play off one another extemporaneously with great fun, the pace is zip-fast, the action totally illogical but something on which could hang a promising comedy.  If onlyŠ  (Grade: C-)