A mainstream, big-budget film with an all-star cast, superficially Horrible Bosses doesn’t have much in common with Kevin Smith’s 1994 cult classic, micro-budget comedy Clerks. But they both manage to capture the attitude of their era’s worker bees.

Clerks spoke to hoards of young Generation Xers who were full of pop culture references but empty of ambition, disappointed but ambitionless, entitled but impotent and stuck in dead-end jobs because they weren’t inspired to seek out better ones. Nearly two decades and a global recession later, Horrible Bosses tells the story of ambitious middle-aged workers everywhere stuck in jobs they hate because they’ve no other options.

Which is all a very pretentious way of saying that after having an unemployed and desperate former classmate offer them hand-jobs for money, Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis decide there’s only one thing to do to avoid a similar fate while keeping sane: kill their employers.

As the titular employers, Kevin Spacey is in fine sociopathic Swimming With Sharks mode, Jennifer Aniston gives a wonderfully filthy turn as a nymphomaniac dentist and Colin Farrell steals the show as an aggressive cokehead. The cartoonish representations of evil are outrageous, as is the plan to kill them, but natural chemistry and rhythm created by Sudekis’ charm, Bateman’s dry humour and Day’s whimsical idiocy ground the fantastical aspects just enough for the concept to work.
The film has some great observations about race and class, and the trio’s middle-class backgrounds are brilliantly played up as they use Law And Order as a planning aid, brazenly ask muscly black barmen where they might procure a hitman and have a hilarious miscommunication over the term “wet work.”

Horrible Bosses does lag slightly in the second act, and coasts along without delving into anything too deeply, favouring light gags over some potentially brilliant black comedy, but it’s still worth skiving off work to go see.