Horrible Bosses

***1/2 stars

There's something wickedly clever about a summer comedy where normal people are thrown into nasty situations, yet there's still a sense that you're rooting for them. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day are a dynamite unit of non-stop laughs and irresistible one-liners in Horrible Bosses, the story of three men who want and then try (emphasis on try) to kill their bosses.

Now don't worry, it's not like their bosses are decent people. These are simply three employees who are literally dealing with the worst management imaginable. Bateman plays Nick Hendricks, the company suck-up to Dave Harken (a perfectly cast Kevin Spacey), the ultimate horrible boss. Nick has been dying for a promotion, one he's been working towards for eight years. To show off Dave's ruthlessness, he decides to promote himself instead of Nick, forcing him to be his bitch forever.

If that's not bad enough, Nick tries to remind him that a few years ago, he wasn't allowed to leave work to see his Grandmother in the hospital. She ended up passing away before Nick could get there. Dave laughs when he calls his grandmother "Gam-gam". Dave is the kind of boss that you absolutely hate, except that he's dosed up on psycho-steroids and constantly looking for his next victim.

Kurt Buckman (Sudeikis) has a wonderful relationship with his boss, Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland). That is, until he has a heart attack and dies. Guess who replaces him? Bobby (the surprisingly hysterical Colin Ferrell), the crazy, coked-up son who doesn't give a rat's ass about anything.

He's so horrible that he asks Kurt to trim the fat off of the employees by literally firing the "fat people" because it makes him sick. Bobby is the kind of boss that stole your job, sunk the company that you've cared about your whole professional career into the toilet, and when discovering about his personal life is, in Kurt's words, as if "you've entered the mind of an asshole".

Now, Dale Arbus (Day) may not have it as bad as Nick and Kurt, but that's only at first glance. He is a dental assistant who is forced to work for his gorgeous boss Dr. Julia Harris (played deliciously by Jennifer Aniston) who constantly wants to have sex with him. This wouldn't be that bad if Dale wasn't happily engaged. Unfortunately for him he can't quit because he was caught urinating at a playground (his defense is that he was drunk in the middle of the night and did not realize it was a playground), so now he's a registered sex offender. Therefore, Dale's choice of unemployment is basically extinct.

Julia is oddly attracted by this, so the more Dale refuses Julia, the more aggressive she is. If you think that's still not enough to justify Dale's actions, his tipping point comes when Julia tries to seduce him by throwing him on top of his unconscious fiance's body during a dental cleaning. In the words of Dale, "let's kill that bitch!"

Horrible Bosses makes the right choice by not taking itself too seriously. We all know that Nick, Kurt, and Dale are not murderers. They've just been so tormented by the man in charge that they see no other option. So when they all finally agree to take their bosses down, they turn to an ex-convict named Mother Fucking Jones to do the job (yes, that is his legal name). Instead, he offers them a mix of good-and-bad advice, telling them that they should kill each others bosses so it can't trace back to any of them.

The question the film asks is: how do normal people go about doing something so morally wrong while having no idea how to do it? When Nick, Kurt, and Dale find themselves going down a road they can't escape from, hilarity ensues. It's the darker-recession version of The Hangover that isn't paltry when it comes to delivering some twisted comedic fun.