Horrible bosses

B-

Foul-mouthed incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill impossibly nasty bosses.

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Slightly more frequently than a blue moon, a movie is so badly written that a viewer with more than one brain cell will soon abandon all hope of it developing interesting plot lines or characters. It will be walked out of or ejected. Horrible Bosses is one such stinker. The key facts to note are the names of the people responsible for it, to ensure one approaches their future efforts with much caution.

The foul-mouthed story and totally incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill their impossibly nasty bosses were created by Michael Markowitz, a US TV series writer who worked on Becker and Duckman. It appears that he accumulated a bottom drawer of story ideas and supposed jokes that had been judged too racist, homophobic, misogynistic or crude for TV, and recycled them into a movie concept, reportedly earning a six-figure auction bid from New Line Cinema.

Six years later, the screenplay had been adjusted by him and a pair of other writers. Young John Francis Daley, a TV series actor (Bones), had previously written a screenplay just once, for an episode of Bones. Older Jonathan Goldstein was a veteran TV series producer who'd also never written for the cinema previously.

Another TV specialist, Seth Gordon, got the director's chair. His only previous movie feature was Four Christmases, a seasonal effort for New Line starring Vince Vaughan; it was relatively successful (its box office gross doubling its hefty US$80 million budget).

Horrible Bosses had a more sensible budget of less than US$40 million, despite having a trio of minor star names playing the ludicrously non-amusing bosses (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell). Another fading star, Jamie Foxx, took a humiliating cameo as a black murder consultant called "Motherfucker", apparently changed at his request from "Cocksucker". There are quite a lot of cock-sucking jokes strewn around the self-proclaimed black comedy.

The trio of "pussies" plotting their bosses' demise are typical 21st century Hollywood serio-comic anti-heroes (a la Hangover etc), played with stereotypical wry grins and wan smiles by bland actors. Charlie Day, a youngish supporting player in Drew Barrymore's Going The Distance, cringes as a registered sex offender working for offensively lustful Jewish dentist Aniston. Middle-aged TV comedian Jason (SNL and 30 Rock) Sudeikis is a dead-pan accountant for Farrel's coke-snorting imbecile boss, and charming Jason (Arrested Development) Bateman looks very tired of being an inconsequential foil for Spacey's megalomaniac character.

None of the bosses are OTT comic figures, not even black-comedic symbols. None of the anti-heroes deserve chuckles or cheers, yet this film's box office gross truly was: US$210 million and still counting, before going to DVD. The coven of writers must know they've found a mother lode: all those obscene and inanely unfunny ideas they dust-binned during TV brainstorms will sell tickets galore to movie-goers eager to wet themselves in a cascade of dirty words.