I just saw the hilarious new movie, “Horrible Bosses,” and want to recommend it to CHALLENGE readers. It is a full-fledged comedy about three buddies who decide, after realizing that they have no other options, to kill their bosses!
Each of the three has a different situation: Nick (Jason Bateman) is a dedicated white-collar worker whose deceitful, treacherous, and completely evil boss (Kevin Spacy) chastises him for being two minutes late for work, among other things. He fails to give him a promotion after leading him to think he’ll get one for months, just to trick him into working harder. Nick tells the boss he’s going to quit, but the boss threatens to blacklist him with all the other companies in the field.
Kurt (Saturday Night Live’s Jason Sudekis) is another hard-working office worker for a small family-owned industrial company, and shows genuine concern for his coworkers. When the druggie, immoral, hedonistic son (Colin Farrell) takes over as head of the company after his father’s death, he threatens to fire Kurt if he doesn’t fire two other workers.
The third main character is Dale (Charlie Day), an innocent, young, and engaged-to-be-married dental assistant who is sexually harassed by his female boss, a dentist played by Jennifer Aniston.
The three men realize that each is stuck in a situation that they can’t get out of. They also realize that each of them would not be able to find another job in the failing economy, and are left with the decision to find a way to kill each other’s bosses.
The rest of the film deals with the bumbling plans of the three men to carry out the killings. There are great supporting roles played by other top actors, especially Jamie Foxx as an equally bumbling potential hit man. A couple of his scenes expose the subtle racism of the three men, making their plans even more difficult. But in the end, things work out in a way that would generally please readers of CHALLENGE.
The film is not for everyone — much of the humor revolves around drug and sexual themes. But the jokes are there from the start of the movie until the end, and the contempt we feel for the three bosses does not dwindle. That was my main worry before seeing the film — that the writers would let the film’s bosses off the hook at the end. But all three bosses get what they deserve. There’s even a cameo at the end, by an actor many will recognize (I won’t give that away), who plays a new boss, but it’s clear, in a humorous little scene, that he’ll be no better!
“Horrible Bosses” is obviously not meant to be a political film, but it can still be useful to communist organizers. It would be a fun way to introduce topics like class structure, capitalist methods of management, and how the threat of unemployment keeps us as wage slaves. It is also interesting to note that this movie is one of the few that deals with sexual harassment of women against men — which is of course far less common than the reverse — but in the movie’s case could only happen because the male worker
was employed by the female dentist.
Finally, I suggest that this movie be seen by comrades and their friends, followed by a discussion of what life would be like in a world without any bosses. There could be rich talks about several topics: the pitfalls of sexism, racism, and drug abuse; how wage slavery exploits us not just economically but emotionally, and intellectually, as well;
why the increasing threat of unemployment leaves workers with few options; why you can’t kill off the bosses without killing capitalism; and finally, how the workplace could be organized under communism, with workers directly in control of their environments.
Red Critic