Movie Box Review

The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but proved himself a very serious and varied talent, in the nearly 2 decades since Aniston and Rudd emerged with Friends and Clueless, it's hard to find a single title in their credits that's genuinely dark or even emotionally complicated (Aniston came closest with The Good Girl in 2002).  Their work is--with some exceptions--fairly reliably successful, but looked at in the aggregate, there's a bland professionalism to both their filmographies.

In Wanderlust, they play a New York couple who think they're about to hit new financial peaks:  Linda (Aniston) is pitching a new documentary to HBO, while George (Rudd) is in line for a big promotion.  Of course, they instead find themselves suddenly facing ruin, and have to leave their "micro-loft" in Manhattan and try something else.  Initially they head for Atlanta, where George will force himself to take a job with the porta-potty company owned by his obnoxious, nouveau riche brother Rick (Ken Marino, also co-writer of the script).  But when they rediscover just how awful Rick and his wife Marissa (Michaela Watkins) are, George and Linda remember their brief, idyllic pit-stop at a commune called Elysium, and decide to try the simple life.

This first section of Wanderlust isn't bad:  the script by director David Wain and Marino--longtime writing partners with pictures like Wet Hot American Summer and Role Models to their credit--has some satiric bite (Linda's epically terrible HBO pitch is particularly funny), and there are plenty of laughs as George and Linda seem to be on their own road to hell.  Once the story arrives (and stays) at Elysium, though, it all gets very tired.  Free love!  Naked penises!  Hallucinogenics!  Natural food!  Back in the 1960s, there was a spate of terrible comedies about how silly hippies were, movies like Skidoo and The Happening, and while Wanderlust is far superior to those bombs, it's not in a very different genre.   George and Linda will be shocked and charmed by the quaint spirits who surround them (the group includes Alan Alda, Kathryn Hahn, Joe Lo Truglio and Lauren Ambrose).  Then they'll be tempted by the possibility of opening their marriage (the main threats to fidelity are supplied by Malin Akerman and Justin Theroux).  They'll both go a little overboard (originally, in the version of the film shown to early audiences, Linda's devotion to Elysium's environmental cause included a protest that featured Aniston's first on-screen nude scene in all its mammary glory, but that's been digitally covered up and and editorially removed, reportedly because of Aniston's concerns about real-life boyfriend Theroux's feelings.)  Eventually, though, the couple realizes that this life just isn't for them, and they'll have to find a saner alternative.

Predictability in comedy isn't a fatal flaw (if it were, rom-coms as a genre wouldn't exist), but Wanderlust only intermittently has anything distinctive to add to its cliches.  And Aniston and Rudd, while certainly pleasant company, have such similar appeal that they're like the Witness Protection versions of themselves, unable to draw anything out of each other besides seemingly endless reserves of good-natured likability.  (I can't believe I'm writing this, but Aniston had more comic chemistry with Adam Sandler in last year's Just Go With It.)

Wanderlust is painless, and when it turns up on an airplane or cable network, you won't suffer while watching it.  But if you get interrupted halfway through and never catch the rest, you won't feel like you're missing anything, either.  Increasingly, the movies Aniston and Rudd make feel like that old line about buses:  miss one, and another just like it will be along soon enough.

HORRIBLE BOSSES - Watch It At Home:  Doesn't Earn A Raise

A comedy can get away with not being very good as long as it's funny, and HORRIBLE BOSSES delivers some laughs.  Most of those come from the chemistry between stars Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, and since the funniest bits come in riffs of casual dialogue, it's hard to tell if they originated in the script by Michael Markowitz, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley or with the actors themselves.  (Daley, by the way, is himself better known as an actor, first as the younger brother in Freaks and Geeks and more recently as the unit's shrink on Bones; he has a small role in the film.)  

Horrible Bosses is fairly enjoyable to watch, even though it whiffs at a great opportunity.  If there's one experience virtually every audience member has shared, it's the plight of working for a petty tyrant, and a revenge comedy pitched to that particular woe, particularly in the current economic climate, could have been wonderful.  But that comedy probably would have teetered on the edge of real human pain and desperation, never Hollywood's preferred territory; instead, we get just occasional hints of the movie that could have been.  Mostly that's in the part of the movie that concerns evil boss Harken (Kevin Spacey) and his pathetic subordinate Nick (Bateman).  As fans of Swimming With Sharks know, there's no one better at playing tyrannical than Spacey (Entourage's Ari could never have existed without Spacey's performance), and Bateman is best when he's allowing flickers of fury to show beneath his passive front.  The early scenes with the two of them, as Spacey sadistically tantalizes Bateman with a promotion he'll never get, vibrate with real comic tension.

That's not Bosses' chosen tone for the most part.  The second storyline has Sudeikis as Kurt, protege of a kindly mentor (Donald Sutherland) who is abruptly replaced by his son Pelliltt (Colin Farrell), a coke-snorting moron who wants to loot the company.  Farrell seems to be having a great time under the most make-up anyone's worn since Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, but his character is more a pig than a despot, and not very intimidating.  The last story makes so little sense that the script has to contrive multiple contrivances for it even to exist:  Dale (Day) is a dental assistant sexually harassed by bombshell dentist Julia (Jennifer Aniston)--the writers create one backstory for Dale to justify his not just quitting, another to explain why he'd be so offended and not delighted to have Jennifer Aniston throwing herself at him (he's supposedly too much in love with his fiance, but she's such a wan, occasional presence in the movie that this makes little sense), and they still never come up with a convincing reason why Aniston would be so obsessed with him in the first place. 

In any case, their mutual misery causes the 3 guys to decide, with the minimal help of hit man "consultant" Jamie Foxx, to kill their bosses in a scrambled Stranger On A Train fashion, which of course they botch thoroughly.  It's a set-up that just about screams for ingenious plotting, but the writers can come up with only one legitimate twist--the rest is lazy TV storytelling, dependent on coincidence and on characters acting like idiots.

And yet, Horrible Bosses is fairly consistently funny.  Sudeikis seems far more comfortable trading quips with Bateman and Day than he did with Owen Wilson in Hall Pass; Day, playing the stupidest character, gets a lot of laughs out of his inanity; and Bateman, the definition of a movie team player, is as supportive with the two of them as he is with Spacey.  Other funny people like Ioan Gruffudd and Julie Bowen turn up, and any movie that casts Wendell Pierce as a cop, even briefly, gets a point in my book.  Director Seth Gordon, who's been doing a lot of TV since his fiction feature debut Four Christmases, doesn't even attempt anything stylistically interesting or attractive, but he stays out of the way of his actors, and that's a skill not to be underrated.

Horrible Bosses could have tried to be funny and provocative too, a modern day Billy Wilder comedy; it doesn't.  It opts instead for what's essentially an R-rated mix of 3 Stooges dumbness with Apatow male bonding.  This summer, though, compared to robots ripping each other apart and superheroes delivering vows to magical rings, silly laughs can look relatively smart.  Horrible Bosses may not be the kind of employee that rockets to a promotion, but it holds onto its job.