Review: Horrible Bosses Blu-ray

STUDIO: Warner | DIRECTOR: Seth Gordon | CAST: Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell
RELEASE DATE: 10/11/2011 | PRICE: DVD $28.98, Blu-ray/DVD Combo $35.99
BONUSES: “Totally Inappropriate” unrated version, featurettes, deleted scenes, more
SPECS: R/NR | 98 min./106 min. | Comedy | 2.40:1 widescreen | DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1/Dolby Digital 5.1 | English, French and Spanish subtitles

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie | Audio | Video | Overall

Three disgruntled employees (talk about a trio of contemporary but still timeless characters!) take their kvetching to the next level when they plot to murder their bosses in the dark-but-not-too-dark revenge comedy Horrible Bosses.

Charlie Day (l.), Jason Sudeikis (ctr.) and Jason Bateman come up with a devilish idea in Horrible Bosses.

Let’s see what we have here: Jason Sudeikis (Hall Pass) must deal with  his nepotistic cokehead boss (Colin Farrell, The Way Back) as he snorts the company’s profits up his nose; dental assistant Charlie Day (TV’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) is constantly resisting the advances of his sexpot boss (Jennifer Aniston, Love Happens); and rising exec Jason Bateman (Paul) is receiving no respect — or career advancement — from his tyrannical supervisor (Kevin Spacey, American Beauty).

At its best, Horrible Bosses is an uneven comedy that clicks when the titular bosses are onscreen in a trio of roles that were surely enjoyed by Aniston, Farrell and Spacey (whose studio executive Buddy Ackerman in 1995’s Swimming With Sharks remains the movies’ all-time nastiest employer). Aniston tosses her romantic comedy image aside and has a few raucous scenes where her sexed up dentist lets loose with some deliciously vulgar language, while Farrell gets a lot of mileage out of his coke-twitchiness and combover. For his part, Spacey’s ugly reaction to a surprise party thrown by his wife is the film’s finest moment.

As for the three employees who set the high-concept story into motion, Jasons Bateman and Sudeikis are fine but never rise above the material, which includes a lot of one-liners with some occasionally cruder quips and gay jokes thrown in. There’s an extended sequence involving a whole lot of cocaine that’s quite funny, but there aren’t really any other bits that stay with you. Day’s whiney voice grows annoying (though it’s appropriate for the character, I suppose) and is best ingested in smaller doses on his TV show.

Director Seth Gordon’s (TV’s Modern Family) set-ups and pacing are fine but undistinguished.

The Blu-ray’s sound and vision are also acceptable — the dialog doesn’t get lost in the music or audio effects and the image is well-detailed and sharply colored.

The extended, unrated version of the film that’s also part of the package — the Totally Inappropriate one — is eight minutes longer than the theatrical. The added material runs around the same temperature as the rest of the film and it’s nothing special, though a flashback explaining how a character named “Muthafuckah Jones” earned his nickname is sorta cute.

As in the film proper, the bonus featurettes on the Blu-ray that are the most fun are the ones that include Spacey, Aniston and Farrell. They pop up in two out of three: one where they reminisce about the worst bosses they’ve ever encountered and, better, a seven-minute piece where they talk about how much they enjoyed digging into their nasty roles.

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