Who's the boss?

Bosses, I’ve been told, derive from ancient Babylonia and the Levant, where each city had a local deity represented by a rock or carved object e.g. Babylon had Marduk. The Punic city of Sidon had Baal and this caused great consternation in the Kingdom of Israel when its monarch Ahab took Jezebel for a wife and to please her, introduced Baal worship. This was an abomination unto the Lord and thus Baal was more reviled as a name than any other. From this incident, descending millennia, through the corruption of colloquialism, the Western world has gradually turned Baal to boss. Hence, the frequent resentment of bosses has historical antecedents and is not simply the product of the modern workplace.
Horrible Bosses taps into the desire to hit back at your manager without any untoward consequences (such as losing your job). When first-person shooter ‘Doom’ was all the rage in the 1990s, computer-literate gamers were said to insert photos of their bosses onto the monsters they were destroying in a variety of ways. This film also riffs on the Hitchock thriller Strangers on a Train, as well as, pleasingly, the Danny DeVito/Billy Crystal vehicle Throw Momma from the Train. Our three put-upon ‘heroes’, played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, find their office superiors so intolerable they decide to murder them but at one turn removed so each has an alibi while the other is doing the wet work.
An intriguing twist is that the bosses are played by actors incomparably more famous (maybe as it should be given the vertical relationship) than those playing their underlings. To say that Jennifer Anniston’s sex pest character was drawn from her own experiences would be libellous – less so, Colin Farrell’s dissolute coke fiend. Kevin Spacey ahs trod this ground before as he reprises his Swimming with Sharks tour de force. It’s good to see Anniston, Farrell and Spacey in a decent film, as their Hollywood acting careers have gone underground, if not into hibernation.
On the flip side, Bateman, Sudeikis and Day do things that are so inconceivably stupid, that you feel they deserve some of their misery. Day’s character is the touched cousin of Zach Galifianakis’ Alan from The Hangover. Unfortunately, their farce stretches the bounds of credibility, taking you out of the plot and back into the cinema seat, as there is only so long one can teeter on the edge of reality if surrealist is not the goal. Jamie Foxx is the one who truly masters the absurdity of his persona’s actions as real life can be ridiculous too. This movie also has subtle comedy to its merit as well, such as saving it's one 12A-mandated f-word to the very end to give a satisfying pay-off to one of the situations or proving that Indian call centres can provide a very valuable service. The head-slapping disbelief regarding some moments deters one from a return viewing but it does a fine job for the time it is running. Three out of five.