After Hours: OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY

Through how many tableaux of bad behavior have we suffered over the last several years? And I’m talking of only the party movie kind. The slow-mo drinking and dancing. The messy floors. The pounding dance music. The people making out or throwing up or swinging punches. The appliances hurled out windows. The drugs splayed out on tables, smoked up in clouds, or dusted over crowds. The bottles broken, syrup spilled, clothes flung, cars crashed, and animals wandering. We’ve seen this in basically every other R-rated comedy of the past decade or so. It no longer has much in the way of shock value, and is only a fun party by proxy if the mix of naughty to nice is exactly right. (Think more Sisters than Project X.) By now it’s a predictable and hyperbolic version of the lampshades on heads or pizzas on turntables of yesteryear. Now here’s Office Christmas Party, the latest excuse to stage the same wild party behavior.

Proficiently and competently directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (of similarly sturdy slight comedies Blades of Glory and The Switch) the whole thing contrives a reason to get rowdy. Set almost exclusively on a couple floors in a Chicago skyscraper, where a tech company (an old-school kind, more Dell than Uber) has its annual Christmas party cancelled. The CEO (Jennifer Aniston) threatens cuts, but her brother (T.J. Miller), as head of this branch, goes behind her back to throw the biggest bash yet. It’s a last ditch effort to pitch an older businessman (Courtney B. Vance) on signing a new contract, the only thing that’ll keep layoffs out of the picture for the next quarter. This leaves decent middle managers (like Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn) scrambling to make sure the wild night saves everyone’s jobs. The stage is set for a commentary on good people trapped in a debased culture – between ruthless profiteering on the one hand, total anarchic largess on the other. But the movie mostly throws that overboard in hopes we’ll root for the corporation.

There are some funny ideas here: a huge company run like a family squabble, markets driven by a rapacious need for constant growth, employees listless and only motivated by fear of firings, society a mindless rabble willing to throw off bounds of decorum at the first opportunity. There’s something perceptive under the surface. Tip the whole thing five or ten degrees in perspective and tone and you’d have a vicious satire of modern America. Alas, it’s just another glossy spread of dumb sitcom excess and juvenile antics dressed up as cutting loose and living it up with no connection to any reality. Watch Miller’s rich dope spend money on a living nativity, huge Christmas trees, a DJ, endless booze, profane ice sculptures, and let the vibrantly devolving bacchanal begin. It’s like Wolf of Wall Street without the bite or wit. Instead we’re just supposed to find it amusing, as wish fulfillment or vicarious thrill. How sad if this is any fantasy earnestly harbored. Worse still the implications in letting quiet, dull, dutiful good-behaving office parties be the enemy. What’s wrong with a simple cheese plate and a non-alcoholic beverage between polite work acquaintances and assorted colleagues?

In some ways, it makes more sense as a disaster movie. Like The Towering Inferno it gathers a lot of characters in a tower and introduces them all with an emotional or professional loose end that’ll be tidily resolved in chaos to come. But that movie had the good decency not to ask us to be primarily invested in whether or not the company that built the structure would be able to make money off the madness. Office Christmas Party is smartly cast down to the smallest role with fun scene-stealers – Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Sam Richardson, Karan Soni, Jamie Chung, Abbey Lee, Andrew Leeds, Matt Walsh, and many more recognizable to anyone who has seen a comedy or two lately. They’re just given routine sitcom plots to enact through the party – a guy who tries to hire an escort to act like his fake girlfriend; a guy who doesn’t tell his boss he has a better job offer; a woman trying to avoid a co-worker after learning something embarrassing about him. They wring some pleasant entertainment, personalities and a brisk pace papering over the fundamental emptiness at its core: a bland celebration of a vulgar holiday spirit, with capitalism and commercialism for all.

Dumbbells: PAIN & GAIN

Michael Bay is Hollywood’s preeminent vulgarian. With movies like Armageddon and Transformers, he specializes in slick imagery that turns a gleaming gaze on people and technology with the same slobbering glee, an objectification that turns everything into button-pushing jolts of spectacle, collateral damage, and queasy humor that leans on distasteful stereotypes more often than not. This sometimes leads to enjoyable movies, sometimes not, but it certainly makes him the right person to direct Pain & Gain, a based-on-a-true-story caper about some lunkheads with big small dreams who basically imagine themselves the heroes of their own Michael Bay movie. His proudly juvenile adrenaline machines in which an outsized id runs free through a glamorously ugly caricature world fits with a story so grotesque and unbelievable it simply must be true (or at least exaggerated from the truth).

The action takes place in Miami during 1994 and 1995. There at the time Bay was filming his feature debut, the cop buddy action comedy Bad Boys. So, alas, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the main character of this movie, instead cites Rocky, Scarface and The Godfather as his cinematic motivation. He, conveniently forgetting the ultimate fate of the protagonists of those films, thinks of them as good examples of guys who made something of themselves, something to aspire to as he prepares to chase his American dream: lots of money, lots of things, and lots of pretty women. He has what he thinks is a great get-rich-quick plan, a sure-fire all-American, get-what’s-coming-to-him windfall. When questioned about his scheme he says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.”

And what is Daniel's plot? He has happened to gain a new client, rich jerk Victor (Tony Shalhoub), who walked into Sun Gym looking for a personal trainer. He’s the kind of guy who says, “You know who invented salads? Poor people.” He’s not a nice guy. Daniel's idea is to recruit two of his co-workers, the steroidal Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and the born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), to help kidnap Victor, make him sign over all his assets blindfolded, and then return him to his routine unable to do anything about it. That sounds easy enough, if rather implausible and with countless details that need to be worked out. But Daniel doesn’t seem to notice those and his partners in crime don’t ask many questions. They all think they’re about to get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s a group of guys smart enough to cook up a scheme, but too dumb to get away unscathed.

The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gives us overlapping narration from all three men and their victim, giving us four perspectives on the events as they unfold. The dissonance between the confidence they constantly speak to us and each other, the pumped-up sheen of Bay’s filmmaking, and the string of dumb decisions they proceed to make provides a recipe for a savage pitch black comedy. When things start to go wrong, as you know they must, it turns into a kind of humid, sun-baked Fargo. (There’s a nasty bit of business with a pile of dismembered limbs that rivals that film’s wood chipper scene.) Bay shoots it all with a smug satisfaction, snickering at these meatheads for buying so whole-heartedly into the American dream of having it all and getting away with it that they can’t see it’s a lie with which all truly successful people learn to compromise. Early on, Wahlberg attends a lecture from a transparently phony motivational speaker (Ken Jeong) and leaves feeling nothing but starry-eyed confidence. Yes, he thinks, even he can make his dreams of obscene wealth come true. That he should go about it in a brutal, haphazard, illegal way is a source of the humor, but in the insistence that perhaps he’s a fool to try anything at all, the film is cynical, nihilistic social satire to its core.

There are no heroes here. The criminals are misguided lugs impossible to root for. Their victim is a smarmy slimeball who’s impossible to wish victory upon. Bay puts the audience in the sometimes uncomfortable position of simply watching the gears of plot turn on these awful people. The late edition of a private eye played by Ed Harris as a weary pragmatist and the only person of professional competence in the whole movie and as such seems to be subtextually shaking his head at the sad weirdness of it all, like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, does much to help cut through the ugliness. But what sometimes beautiful ugliness! Bay’s muscular showiness is put to good use here, laying out tawdry, glittery lifestyles of the almost rich and gaudily infamous-in-their-own-minds, lives that play out sadly in gyms, strip clubs, and on Floridian beaches.

There’s huge entertainment to be had in the rapid-fire montage that keeps the pace speedy throughout the entire two-hour-plus runtime and the collision of light performances with the heavy dark violence and vulgarity. Instead of risking the audience lose track of his satirical point, Bay makes it quite clear that he’s in on the joke. As brutish satire, it makes its jabs early and finds only ways to repeat them thereafter. Luckily the performers (I haven’t even mentioned fun supporting roles filled by Rob Corddry, Bar Paly and Rebel Wilson) are agile and funny and the story itself is strange and unpredictable enough to keep things interesting. It’s a credit to the great cast, twisty plot, and Bay’s aggressively watchable, just-shy-of garishly colorful style that I didn’t grow tired. I didn’t love it or loathe it, but I think I had fun.

Undying Love: WARM BODIES

When R (Nicholas Hoult) meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), he doesn’t know what to say. He’s understandably tongue-tied, and not just because she’s a smart, capable, pretty blonde in tight jeans. He’s dead. Well, he’s not dead, exactly. He’s undead. Warm Bodies, written and directed by Jonathan Levine from the novel by Isaac Marion, takes place some years after the dawn of a zombie apocalypse and R is just one of many reanimated corpses shambling about the ruins of civilization. He’s an unusual zombie since his brain seems to be rattling about with a fair amount of activity. There’s enough going on in there, at least, to provide us with a chatty narration that his rigor mortis won’t allow him to vocalize properly. We’re in his head and can tell he’s instantly in love with Julie even though she and her friends are being attacked by his kind, judging by the way the scene drops into slow motion and an 80’s pop ballad fills the soundtrack as she fires her rifle, hair blowing, cheeks rosy.

Warm Bodies would be more of a satire of the kind of paranormal romances that have flourished in these post-Twilight days if it didn’t work pretty well as a rather surprisingly charming romance itself. R protects Julie from having her brain turned into a snack, sheltering her in a crashed airplane where he keeps his record collection. (The movie has a nice soundtrack to go with those stacks of vinyl.)  She’s understandably scared at first. Her dad (John Malkovich) is the leader of their walled-off, heavily armed city of survivors. She’s been trained to shoot to kill the undead without hesitation. She’s weaponless behind zombie territory when R saves her. And he’s kind, clearly making an effort, straining to be understood through his hunched body language and groaning monosyllabic vocabulary. She decides he’s not so bad for a dead guy.

Though the resolutely PG-13 film has a fair amount of guts and gore kept just out of frame, this is a zombie movie for people who don’t like zombie movies. It’s a sweet and hopeful post apocalypse with appealing lead performances. Hoult makes for a likable monster in that he never comes across like one. Sure, he munches on brains, but our access to his inner monologue makes him seem appropriately conflicted about it. And as his relationship with Palmer grows hesitantly warmer, so too does his yearning to be free of the curse of being a zombie. This sets into motion a strangely off-handed search-for-a-cure plot that helps to move the film towards its conclusion. Along the way we meet other zombies who are starting to spark back to life, including a funny Rob Corddry, playing a likable zombie in what amounts to his most restrained performance ever, grunting out barely half a word at a time, but nonetheless getting some of the film’s biggest laughs.

Since we’re expected to like these zombies, there are also roaming packs of plague-ridden antagonists in the form of rotted out skeletons, undead too far gone, who are irredeemable and therefore suitable cannon fodder. It works to tie up the plot and force a conclusion through fairly standard action beats that are the least inspired aspect of this altogether pleasant amusement. What works best is the genuinely heartfelt chemistry at the core. Despite bordering on sappy with its insistence that true love can break through even cold, dead zombie hearts, Hoult and Palmer give appealing performances that are heartwarming enough to buy it. Levine, whose last feature was 50/50, a largely, and improbably, enjoyable comedy about a young man with cancer, knows how to find comedy out of tough scenarios and directs here with a light touch that never pushes too hard against material so pleasingly slight and likably diverting.

Tub to the Future: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

Hot Tub Time Machine has a great title. It’s short and silly; gleefully direct and goofy. If only the movie that appears after the title were possessed with similar qualities. The movie never rises to the level of the title. Or should that be lowers? Instead, the movie is a slog of manic vulgarity pitched at the same shrieking level for the entire run time. There’s little modulation to be found.

But it sure starts promisingly enough. Three middle-aged men are fed-up with their sad lives. John Cusack was dumped, Craig Robinson works at a salon for dogs, and Rob Corddry just tried to commit suicide. To try to cheer themselves up, they go away for a weekend at a ski resort that was the site of good times back when they were in their late-teens and early-twenties. Cusack has to bring his nephew, Clark Duke, along for the trip, promising him a great time. Too bad the kid would rather be playing “Second Life.” They’re all pretty depressed, a situation that isn’t helped by the decrepitude of the resort’s current state. Before you know it, their suite’s hot tub lights up with a seductive glow and burbles with suspicious bubbles. They hop in and whoosh! It’s 1986!

The movie is content to run through a typical time-travel plot, complete with paradoxes and culture-clashes, and even has a wizened, though very vague, Doc Brown figure played by Chevy Chase who pops up from time to time to deliver oddball exposition. Contributing to the 80’s vibe is Crispin Glover as the bellhop. Luckily, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s content to wallow in the traditional trappings of a middling 80’s comedy. Unluckily, this means the (hopefully) ironic sexism and homophobia piles up until it starts to feel like the real thing. I did laugh, though, at the name of the pompous preppie who bullies the leads. Is there a more 80’s-sounding villain-name than Blaine?

The movie is essentially a whirlwind of pop-culture references and very gross gross-out gags. Director Steve Pink keeps things fast, goofy, and totally undisciplined, but the jokes just aren’t funny. It’s not really the cast’s fault. Cusack’s appealing, Duke does his best, and Robinson’s quietly hilarious. Corddry’s ultimately grating (he leaves no line un-shouted), but that’s just an example of poor direction. The main buzz-kill is the script, attributed to Josh Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris. They came up with a great idea, but not enough details to fill it in. It’s a pile-up of desperate attempts at humor that clogs up the path of the genuinely funny moments.

I wanted to like the movie, I really did, and I would be dishonest if I sat here and wrote that I never laughed. The movie has some fun moments here and there – a cute visual echo of Sixteen Candles famous kitchen-table kiss, a funny twist on Back to the Future’s “Johnny B. Goode” sequence that substitutes Chuck Berry with the Black-Eyed Peas – but as an entire experience, the movie just falls flat.