The characters of the modern workplace comedy, like the rest of us, don’t know how to make a living anymore.
Having haplessly tried to murder their bosses in the first “Horrible Bosses,” Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis return in “Horrible Bosses 2” as hopeful inventors. “Let’s bet on ourselves,” they tell each other, making a clearly questionable wager. They go into business with a bath product dubbed “Shower Buddy,” and with their abysmal guest spot on a morning show promoting it, it’s clear they may have backed the wrong horse.
It’s become a familiar genre trope of recent years: The idealistic self-starter business that almost certainly wouldn’t stand a chance in real life. Dwarfed by corporations or left behind by the digital economy, comedies are routinely littered with plucky upstarts, from Kristen Wiig’s would-be baker in “Bridesmaids” to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s middle-aged Google aspirants of “The Internship.”
While the first “Horrible Bosses” tried to tap into the widely held fantasy of killing the overlords of the office, its sequel mines the farce in being your own boss. The entrepreneurial efforts of the film’s ever-yammering trio, of course, fail, and the film descends into a thinly sketched kidnapping plot that serves mainly to space its celebrity cameos.
