Movie Review: Office Christmas Party
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- There are office flicks and there are Christmas flicks and there are party flicks, none of them screaming out promises of import or excellence.
Then there is Office Christmas Party, a holiday comedy that bakes all three genre into the same seasonal fruitcake and comes up wanting.
Would that we could laugh more, given that 'tis the season, as they say, to be jolly.
Well, we moviegoers are tryin', we're tryin'.
But maybe the movies aren't cooperating.
Does the title refer to a Christmas party at the office or an office party at Christmas?
Whichever it is, it comes from directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory, The Switch), who maintain a certain affability, but jettison the holiday element early on and can only deliver laughs on a few-and-far-between basis.
The film is set in Chicago, where Carol Vanstone, the uptight Chief Executive Officer of a struggling tech company called Zenotech, played by Jennifer Aniston, has decided to cut staff bonuses and then close the branch managed by her loose-cannon brother, Clay, played by T.J. Miller.
They're in conflict about what to do with their father's cherished company.
So Clay huddles with his Chief Technology Officer, Josh Parker, played by Jason Bateman, and they decide to throw their annual yuletide shindig but on a much bigger and wilder scale in an effort to woo and impress and corral a potential major client (Courtney B. Vance), and thus add millions to the till and rescue the branch from extinction by closing a sale that will save their and their co-workers' jobs.
Not that the title is a misnomer, but the titular bash is not the whole movie or even the climax. Instead, it's the second-act centerpiece, the out-of-hand party of decided destructiveness and debauchery that, as the trailer makes plain, pretty much sells the movie -- the threadbare premise and bare-bones plot be darned.
But the burst of third-act sentiment feels desperate and insincere.
Kate McKinnon does what she can as the Human Resources disapprover and Olivia Munn plays the romantic interest for Bateman's Josh, but nobody really gets the chance to shine.
Office Christmas Party is admittedly lowbrow. But lowbrow isn't the problem.
It's unapologetically silly and goofy. But silly and goofy isn't the problem.
And it's crowded and frenetic and overwrought. Okay, maybe that's a big part of the problem.
The premise is, of course, just an excuse for the pranks and the hijinks. Which is okay. No one expects a thoughtful masterwork.
But the frequent problem with party flicks kicks in pretty quickly; to wit, as it were: If the film is bad, we sit there thinking that we'd rather be at a party like the one depicted; while if it's good, it's because we're watching a party we'd be entertained by attending.
Either way, we're wishing we weren't there, focusing our attention on the movie.
Screenplay authors Justin Malen, Laura Solon, and Dan Mazer, basing their script on a story by Jon Lucas, Scott Moore, and Timothy Dowling (wow, six contributors: red flag, red flag), seem to have taken the approach of rounding up as many anecdotes about office Christmas parties as they could and then cramming them into the wafer-thin premise.
But their basic approach here is to fill the screen with funny people and then just let them do their thing.
Well, that's fine and dandy for the film's first half but, predictably, with a script this shallow and arbitrary, there's nowhere to go at that point but to give up on the premise, have the principals leave the party and then just vamp for the remainder of the running time, until the audience is treated to outtakes that are funnier and tastier than the main course.
So we'll raise a glass to 2 stars out of 4 for Office Christmas Party, a raucous, regrettable ensemble disaster comedy that depends on seasonal goodwill to be forgiven its various trespasses.
