The best – well, maybe not “best” – but most satisfying scene in Horrible Bosses 2 is when Jamie Foxx’s character Motherf**ker Jones informs our three heroes that they’re no longer nice guys in a tight corner – they’re criminals. Of course they are: in the first film Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) wanted to murder their bosses because those bosses were so horrible they couldn’t see another way out, and now when they find their new business over a barrel thanks to the sneaky manoeuvrings of corporate bigwig Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz), their big plan to save the day is to kidnap Bert’s smarmy son Rex (Chris Pine). These are not the thought processes of law-abiding citizens.
For a movie that’s clearly just an excuse for at least two of the three leads to riff away like crazy, there is a fair amount of story going on here, and while a comparison to the dumb criminal classics of Elmore Leonard would be ranking this much too high, it does occasionally feel a tiny bit more like one of his novels than you might expect. But only occasionally: for the most part this is a film where Day and Sudeikis not so much banter as talk at each other non-stop. So much so that even characters in the film are asking them to give it a rest. Technically it suits their characters (Dale being the nervous one while Kurt is constantly and cheerfully up for anything) but the result is a movie that leans far too much on the idea that these two guys talking and talking and talking will eventually get a laugh somewhere in there. Not that this doesn’t have the occasional decent joke: bringing back both Jennifer Aniston’s and Kevin Spacey’s characters from the first film gets laughs without being too overdone, while Pine has a nice line in charming bastardry working for him here.
But while this is rarely unfunny, the funny stuff is stretched pretty thin throughout the film, making it a comedy that moves along nicely enough without ever really providing any big laughs. If there was a twenty minute edit, it’d be a classic. At this length you’ll find yourself checking your phone way too often.
By Anthony Morris