“Office Christmas Party”– Movie Review

 

This week, I attended a screening by The New York Times Film Club of the new comedy “Office Christmas Party”, starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman. 

Synopsis

When a corporate CEO decides to close the branch run by her brother, he decides to throw a Christmas Party to please a potential client – but will doing so save his job or serve to seal his fate?

Story

With the impending holidays, the employees of Zenotek’s Chicago office are looking forward to their company’s modest party.  Unknown to them, though, this may be their farewell party.  After her father’s recent death, Carol (Aniston) has been named interim CEO and with the branch under-performing in revenue, she is going to close it, putting all of the employees out of work – including her own brother Clay (T.J. Miller), who is the branch manager.  This being the case, Carol orders the party cancelled, but Clay wants to hold it anyway to reward his workers. 

Given everyone’s jobs are in jeopardy, Clay gets an idea:  if he can land a big client, he can keep the branch open and everyone can remain employed.  Instead of cancelling the party, Clay decides to make it even more elaborate, including spending considerably to enhance the festivities with an excessive amount of alcohol.  Clay invites the prospective client to the party and things get out of hand when everyone gets drunk.  When they all have a good time, it seems that Clay may have won the new business – but when it turns out that this is not the case, he must face the consequences.    

This is where Josh (Batemen) steps up.  As the company’s Chief Technical Officer, he urges his Senior Software Architect Tracey (Olivia Munn) to resume working on her latest idea, which could save the branch.  As it turns out, Tracey is encountering challenges trying to finish her proof-of-concept in order to give a demonstration.  Meanwhile, when it is discovered that Clay is now broke because spent all of his own money on the party, Josh and Carol must set out to try to find him after he got drunk and disappeared.  But even if they can locate Clay, will Tracey be able to complete her project in time to ensure the future of the Chicago office?  

Review

With such a great cast – and unsurprisingly, Kate McKinnon from “Saturday Night Live” gives the funniest performance – it would be understandable to have high hopes for “Office Christmas Party”.  Unfortunately, it’s a very uneven comedy; many of the jokes fail to deliver the impact they intend, mostly because they’re already quite familiar to us.  “Office Christmas Party” tries to combine the magic of “Horrible Bosses” and “The Hangover” and winds up being a pale imitation of the two.  If you make it through the entire film, the end credits contain outtakes.  Déjà vu?

Aside from McKinnon, there are other good comic performances including her SNL cohort Vanessa Bayer as a recently separated single mom looking for a new love at the office and Rob Corddry as an employee fed up with the company’s overbearing rules as enforced by the Human Resources department.  Aniston’s role is reminiscent of the aforementioned “Horrible Bosses” in that she is a downright unpleasant and soulless executive, but her Carol is far from the other movie’s nymphomaniacal dentist.  As Clay, T. J. Miller seems like a natural fit cast as the irresponsible younger brother of Carol.    

A rowdy, raunchy, raucous comedy can be quite the welcome relief during the sometimes stressful holiday season; it’s just too bad that “Office Christmas Party” is nowhere near as clever as it would like to believe it is.  The film winds up as rather routine fare with the exception of some entertaining moments.  If you’re not attending your own office holiday party this year – or even if you did and it didn’t turn out to be much fun – then maybe “Office Christmas Party” is worth a try.  It could cheer you up, assuming you’re not asking very much from the movie because we’ve seen it all before.