OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY: A Wasted Opportunity To Have Fun With Wasted People

Now playing at a multiplex near us all:
OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY

(Dirs. Josh Gordon & Will Speck, 2016)

As a kid, I believe that I learned from Mad Magazine, and various other satirical sources, the clichés associated with office Christmas parties – i.e. employees getting blind drunk, shedding their work attire, Xeroxing their asses, throwing office equipment out the window, and having sex with people they normally wouldn’t. 

They’re all here in this new raunchy comedy from Josh Gordon and Will Speck, the filmmakers behind BLADES OF GLORY, THE SWITCH, and that failed Cavemen sitcom that was spun off from a series of GEICO ads (not exactly a shining pedigree, huh?).

So if anybody can take those familiar tropes and make them funny all over again, the over qualified comic cast assembled here surely can. You’d think, right?

Nope - despite the best efforts of Jason Bateman, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Olivia Munn, Rob Corddry, and a couple of SNL ladies, Kate McKinnon and Vanessa Bayer, this is a forgettable romp with as many uninspired gags as there are predictable plot mechanics.

Bateman, who’s fifth film this is with Aniston, plays the newly divorced Josh Parker, a Data Storage Solutions CTO at Zenotek, a Chicago based tech company run by Miller as branch president Clay Vanstone. Clay’s sister, Carol (Aniston), is the corporation’s CEO, and she’s threatening to close her brother’s branch down or firing 40% of the staff unless they can land a major client, Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance), and score a $14 million contract.

Carol also forbids Clay and his staff from having a Christmas party this year. Of course, they ignore her and plan on throwing the biggest bash ever complete with a live nativity scene with actors, a DJ (Veep’s Sam Richardson), and water coolers filled with liquor, in hopes of impressing their potential client.

If only hilarity ensued instead of a bunch of predictable, unfunny story strands like the one about the IT head (Karan Soni) who hires a hooker (Abby Lee Kershaw) because he lied to his co-workers about having a girlfriend, or the one about Bayer looking for love with office mate Randall Park only to find he has a weird fetish, or the one about McKinnon’s HR manager Mary shedding her PC-obsessed, by-the-book nature and getting her party on.

There’s even the old standby of having two characters, Bateman’s and Munn’s, getting locked out together on the roof so that realize they’re supposed to be together.

Although there’s lots of shots of nudity and abundant profanity, the movie really isn’t that raunch-minded. It’s oddly more concerned with the stakes of trying to save the company via some internet server deal that Munn’s Tracey has been developing while the over-the-top destruction of their office space goes on in the background (in another worn out convention, everyone in Chicago has been invited to the party thanks to social media).

There are intermittent laughs with random one-liners landing and some successful sight gags, but overall this is a wasted opportunity to really have fun with wasted people.

This year seems to have seen every kind of bad comedy there is, so the naughty, R-rated Christmas comedy genre is represented here. I bet the after effect for the cast, who will all undoubtedly go on to better things, will be much the same as for a real office Christmas party, let’s all forget that any of that embarrassing stuff ever happened and get back to work.

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DEADPOOL: Marvel’s Most Meta & Most Hilarious Movie

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

DEADPOOL (Dir. An Overpaid Tool, 2016)

In its first few minutes, in which we swirl around the chaotic imagery of a frozen bridge-set action scene involving a car crash, Marvel’s latest superhero movie declares its intentions by way of an ultra satirical take on the standard self-serious opening credit sequence that we’ve all been through a billion times.

That is, the shiny text that glides through the freeze-framed craziness doesn’t relay any actual names, just snarky labels such as that the film stars “God’s Perfect Idiot,” “A Hot Chick,” “A British Villain,” “A CGI Character,” “A Moody Teen,” was “Produced by: Asshats,” and most amusingly “Written By: The Real Heroes Here.”

Now, I must confess that I am fairly comics illiterate and had not heard of the Deadpool character, who I understand is a super anti-hero (or a anti-superhero?), until rather recently. This is despite the fact that the character, or his alter ego Wade Wilson, appeared in X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, also played by Ryan Reynolds.

But Reynolds himself has stressed that the character in WOLVERINE is “not the Deadpool we are representing in this film, in any way shape or form.” So DEADPOOL, based on the Marvel comics character that first appeared in the early ‘90s, is its own origin story told by its wisecracking, fourth wall breaking protagonist, making it the most meta Marvel movie yet.

Reynold’s Deadpool, while still caught up in the mayhem on the bridge from the opening scene, stops time to tell us that his tale starts off as “love story.”

In flashbacks we see Wade, a Special Forces operative turned mercenary, fall for Vanessa Carlysle (Morena Baccarin), a prostitute with a heart of gold, but, after some racy sex scene snippets, a diagnosis that he has terminal cancer gets in the way of their relationship’s development. Wade leaves Vanessa to seek treatment, and takes part in an questionable experiment that turns out to be a series of torture techniques conducted by our “British Villain,” Ajax/Francis Freeman (Ed Skrein), and his assistant Angel Dust (Gina Carano).

Wade goes through this ordeal thinking that it will turn him into a superhero – “Please don't make the super-suit green... or animated!” – but it leaves him deformed and mutated. However, he does have the power of regeneration so there’s that.

With the help of his best friend bartender, Weasel (T.J. Miller), and a montage, Wade names himself after a bar bet on his life, suits up as a masked crime-fighting vigilante, and sets his sights on hunting down Ajax and getting him to cure his hideous condition that has rendered him, in his words, a “butter face” (you know, “A girl with an exceptionally hot body but an exceptionally ugly face. ‘Everything but-her-face is attractive.’” – Urban Dictionary). Not sure I really had to quote that definition, but there you have it.

Joining Wade/Deadpool’s fight is X-Men mutant Collosus (Stefan Kapicic), and a new character, (well, new to me) Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who are funny enough, but don’t really add a lot to the proceedings.

The hard R-rated DEADPOOL is more than a laugh-a-minute affair; it’s more like a plethora o’ laughs-a-minute from the opening shot to the final stinger (seriously, stay to the bitter end).

Screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese really give meta-joke meisters Phil Lord and Chris Miller (THE LEGO MOVIE, the 21 JUMP STREET movie series, The Last Man on Earth) a run for their money here.

Reynolds, who’s one of the film’s producers, redeems himself for the superhero fail that was GREEN LANTERN, with his displays of quick-on-the-draw wit, and martial arts skills that he has obviously done some deep training to attain. He just may have put in the greatest comic lead man performance in a superhero movie ever (it might be a tie with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man though).

First-time director Tim Miller, who hails from an animation/visual effects background (SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and various video games), provides exciting bursts of full blown filmmaking here. It’s a damn fine debut for somebody who’s credited as “some douche” and “an overpaid tool” in the aforementioned credits.

The superhero origin story formula is still present, but it’s re-invigorated by the ultra irreverent handling of the usual elements here. Film fans are most likely aware of the “Honest Trailers” that the site Screen Junkies has produced, in which a beloved movie gets a factual dressing down. DEADPOOL functions as its own Honest Trailer that takes itself apart. Such moments like when Reynold’s Deadpool notes inside of a flashback: “Fourth wall break inside a fourth wall break - that's like 16 walls!” attest to that.

Marvel’s superhero movies are essentially comedies, but the foul-mouthed, crude, raunchy, and violent as f*** DEADPOOL takes the self awareness factor to the next level. It’s the most hilarious Marvel movie yet, even though it’s not really a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (it's a Marvel property but it isn’t owned by Disney, so it’s part of Fox’s X-Men universe), and a welcome breather from franchise fatique. Nice to finally meet you, Deadpool. Here’s hoping you don’t wear out your winning welcome.

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