Review: "Office Christmas Party"

“Office Christmas Party” starts out a little funny, a little sweet, and then slowly devolves into a dumb raunch-fest.

Don’t get me wrong: a good filthy comedy can be just the thing to break up the dull parade of PG-13 action flicks and kiddie fare (see the first “Hangover”). But when it’s not executed well it becomes like the loud, drunk guy at the party everyone wishes would leave (see, or rather don’t, the other “Hangover” flicks).

This is the rare movie where the fringe characters are more interesting than the stars. If you cut out everything with Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, T. J. Miller and Olivia Munn, you’d have a discombobulated but very tight story of a bunch of office denizens caught up in the weirdest, wilding holiday party ever.

There’s the dweeby guy (Karan Soni) who’s been bragging to his fellow tech nerds about his hot nonexistent girlfriend, so he hires a prostitute to play her. Things go OK until she decides to freelance a little extra action from his buddies, and her she-pimp starts waving a pistol around.

Kate McKinnon of “Saturday Night Live” and “Ghostbusters” scores with another kooky character concoction, an uptight Human Resources manager named Mary who acts as the resident killjoy, but secretly has a freak flag in need of flying.

Then there’s the budding romance between single mom/office manager superstar Allison (Vanessa Bayer) and sweet-natured Fred (Randall Park), whose pet peeve is the underrepresentation of Asian men in adult films.

Fortune Feimster has a scene-stealing turn as a novice and overly exuberant Uber driver who hasn’t figured out what the appropriate level of chatter with the fares is yet. She keeps popping off one killer throwaway line after another, and I wished she would drop off Aniston and the movie could follow her the rest of the way.

But…

The setup is that the Chicago branch of a biggish tech firm is run by the ne’er-do-well son (Miller) of the dearly departed company founder. It’s a loose house and there’s plenty of goofing off, but they make money and realize growth – just not enough to please the hardcase CEO, played by Aniston, who happens to be his sister.

She’s got a lifetime of resentment built up over having to do all the work while golden boy slacked and got ahead, so she’s determined to cut costs to the bone – even ordering a 40% layoff, nixing bonuses and even canceling the hallowed Christmas party.

Rich boy hatches a plan with his nice guy Number Two, Josh (Bateman), who really runs the office, to land a big contract with a major mover (Courtney B. Vance) and save everyone’s bacon. But, using the sort of logic that only works in movies, they’ve got to go ahead with the wildest office party ever to impress the crusty older dude.

Munn plays Tracey, the resident hacker whiz who has a plan to route Internet signals through anything electric, from street lamps to hot dog rotisserie machines. (Question: once they flip it on and everyone’s got free Wifi, how exactly do they make money?)

I think we all know where this is headed. There will be hookups, hilarious injuries, hard drugs will make an appearance, and some scary guys will threaten our heroes for about a minute and a half. Just grab the plots from the “Hangover” movies and a smattering of ‘80s comedies like “Risky Business” and “Bachelor Party,” toss it in a blender and drink deep until you can’t take it anymore.

Review: "Central Intelligence"

I like both Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. They have winning personalities, beaming smiles and great screen presence. I’m not sure if either one of them is nearly as funny as he thinks he is, though.

It’s the same way with “Central Intelligence,” their new buddy cop comedy. It’s an agreeable picture with some outrageous jokes, wacky setups and a few harder-edged action scenes to spice things up. A laugh riot it is not.

Most of the attempted humor comes from Hart playing his type and Johnson playing against type. Hart, by virtue of his diminutive height and comedic personality, is always the nervous nelly trying to front that he is cooler/tougher than he really is. Johnson, playing a lot of hyper-masculine action roles lately, is a dweeb who loves unicorns, fanny packs and cinnamon pancakes.

This really is part of his cover as CIA agent Bob Stone. Formerly the fat kid in high school who was the subject of a cruel prank -- Johnson’s body is digitally morphed onto another actor’s body for the flashback -- he’s grown up into a tower of muscles who can take out a handful of bad guys without even blinking.

There’s no cockiness to him, though, and in fact Bob is in awe of Calvin “The Golden Jet” Joyner (Hart), the BMOC in high school who everyone looked up to. Flash forward 20 years and his promising life has turned into disappointment, a nowhere job in forensic accounting, a fantastic wife (Danielle Nicolet) but no kids. He’s just… stuck.

Bob shows up out of the blue and invites Calvin for drinks, which turns into a bar fight, which turns into a sleepover, which turns into CIA agents showing up on his doorstep claiming Bob is a rogue agent trying to sell vital intelligence to the highest bidder. From there the movie is a series of chases as Calvin tries to decide if Bob is on the level or not, in between fistfights and shootouts.

Amy Ryan plays the grim head spook who leads the hunt, and Jason Bateman turns up in an uncredited role as one of Bob’s former teenage tormentors who seems to have experienced a change of heart.

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber from a screenplay he co-wrote with Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, “Central Intelligence” is all broad humor and telegraphed punchlines. For instance, when Bob encourages Calvin to replicate the backward flip he was famous for back in the day, we just know it’s going to come in handy during a pivotal fight scene.

They do manage to sneak in a few clever throwaway jokes, such as Bob calling Calvin a “snack-size Denzel” for his performance in fooling some bad guys. I also liked the quip where Calvin, after first witnessing Bob in action, refers to his non-badass attire, dubbing him “Jason Bourne in jorts.”

I can’t quite recommend this movie, but I didn’t hate it. It just needed to be funnier and not take aim at the most obvious jokes possible. Sass and charisma will only take you so far.

Review: "Horrible Bosses 2"

I liked “Horrible Bosses” just enough to give it a wobbly recommendation. It was a scattershot-funny comedy with a novel premise: three working stiffs decide to off their evil bosses, with each doing another’s tormentor to throw off suspicion. Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikas and Jason were agreeably dippy as modern guys trying to get medieval, and failing pathetically.

It did well at the box office, so here’s the inevitable sequel, with an almost entirely different set of filmmakers swapped out and anything resembling cleverness leached away.

The setup is that the trio has now left behind the world of worker bee slavery to become their own bosses. They’ve come up with an idea for a product called the Shower Buddy, which, near as I can determine, all it does differently from a regular shower head is also squirt shampoo on you along with the water. The miracles of the modern age!

Still, it does well enough that they launch their company, rent a warehouse, buy some equipment and start hiring employees. There’s a modestly funny montage of them conducting job interviews, with the joke being that they hire absolutely everyone, including the scary ex-con and the woman who can’t speak English.

At first, I thought this would be a deliciously sly bit of satire in which the upstarts themselves turn into the horrible bosses, and another set of underlings decide to kill them, leading to more recriminations and hijinks. Alas, no, it quickly devolves into an unfunny retread of the last movie, but instead of attempted murder they kidnap somebody for ransom.

The heavy here is Christoph Waltz as the magnate of a home products retailer, who agrees to carry the Shower Buddy but then reneges at the last minute, threatening to toss the boys into financial ruin. To get back at him and retrieve their money, they resolve to kidnap the jerk’s even jerkier son, played by Chris Pine. But the kid has a better idea: cut him in on the scam, and they don’t even have to go through with the actual kidnapping.

The lead actors all play familiar versions of their star personas. Bateman is Nick, the careful, slightly repressed one; Day is Dale, the nervous nebbish who now has a wife and triplet baby daughters; Sudeikis is Kurt, the resident horndog because, well, every comedy ensemble needs one.

Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Jamie Foxx all return for cameos of their characters from the original movie, respectively: sadistic boss, now behind bars; sex-addicted dentist, still addicted to sex; and criminal consigliore who’s a lot less badass than he lets on.

Aniston was the MVP of the last movie, and proves so again here. Maybe it’s because she’s largely played sweethearts that the notion of her as a lecherous pervert is especially zingy, but in any case she scores the most laughs with her naughty banter.

The jokes come fast, fast, fast and mostly miss, miss, miss. The script seems barely polished above the level of ad-lib, and largely consists of a bunch of scenes of the crew popping off and cracking on each other.

I’m still a little fuzzy about who exactly the horrible bosses of “Horrible Bosses 2” are supposed to be – the Waltz character may be a tool but he’s not their boss, just a backstabbing customer. Of course, “Horrible Vendor-Client Relationships” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Review: "This Is Where I Leave You"

I'm not sure if "This Is Where I Leave You" is the most original film ever made, but what it lacks in freshness it makes up for with delectable actors and snappy scenes. The Altmans are borderline crazy, self-obsessed and narcissistic, but somehow 103 minutes with them feels like time well spent.

Directed by Shawn Levy ("Night at the Museum") from a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, based on his own novel, the movie brings together the four adult children of the Altman clan after their father passes away. Mom Hillary (Jane Fonda) is a real piece of work, a showboating therapist who wrote a best-selling book, "Cradle and All," in which she spilled the intimate details of her kids' tumultuous upraising.

They have not, unsurprisingly, turned into well-adjusted adults. And they're none too pleased about their mom's insistence that they sit Shiva together for seven days, per their father's dying request. (This, despite being only partially and nominally Jewish.)

Judd (Jason Bateman) is the fulcrum, the character upon which all the others pivot. A successful radio producer and one of those guys who seems to have the perfect little life planned out, he's thrown for a loop when he catches his wife sleeping with his boss.

Sister Wendy (Tina Fey) is brittle and angry, mother to two young kids and married to an on-the-go businessman who can't put down the phone and work for even a few minutes, not to mention witness the miracle if his child's potty training.

Paul (Corey Stoll) is the oldest and most responsible, the one kid who stuck around in his hometown to take over the business from his father. He and his wife (Kathryn Hahn) have been trying without success to get pregnant, and the pressure and constant questions about their progress is like splitting a rail.

The baby of the clan is Phillip (Adam Driver), born years after the others and partially raised by them. A natural-born screw-up with an impish talent for needling others, Phillip is dating a much older woman (Connie Britton) who acts as his enabler and sugar momma.

The filmmakers essentially throw this grab-bag of resentment, sibling rivalry and neuroticism into a pot and set it to a slow boil. There are arguments, jokes, bonding, more fighting, and so on.

It doesn't sound like much, but the cast really drives the material to terrific heights. They click in a way that you rarely see large ensemble casts do; usually each actor is trying to accomplish their own goals for their character and sacrifice the group dynamic. This is the sort of movie that you can't imagine any other performers in those roles.

A few minor characters flit in and out of the foreground. Across the street is Hillary's dependable friend Linda (Debra Monk) and her son Horry (Timothy Olyphant), a former beau of Wendy's who suffered a terrible brain injury years ago. He sort of wanders around, helpful but forgetful, like a more verbally proficient Boo Radley.

Wade's estranged wife (Abigail Spencer) turns up, pleading for a second chance and with more drama to share. Penny Moore is a townie (Rose Byrne) who's stoked a long-burning fire for Wade, and he's at a low point where those glowing embers are looking pretty good. I also enjoyed Ben Schwartz as a young rabbi who can't outrun his horndog teen reputation and nickname.

Despite not a lot of screen time to spread around to every character's story, the film does a good job of making each of them distinct and relatable.

"This Is Where I Leave You" plays out fairly predictably, but I didn't mind the lack of surprises because the journey getting there is so caustically funny and unexpectedly heartwarming. When the Altmans aren't verbally punching each other -- sometimes physically, too -- you want to give them all a good squeeze.

Video review: "Bad Words"

A lot of movies want to seem edgy and dark, but for the most part they’re pretenders, inching up to the line of actual rebelliousness and then backing away with a smirk. “Bad Words” is not one of them. It’s a pitch-black comedy that gleefully barrels into offensive territory, then dares you not to laugh.

It stars Jason Bateman -- who also makes his directing debut -- as Guy Trilby, a 40-year-old man who hoodwinks his way into the Golden Quill National Spelling Bee for eighth graders.

Competing against kids in the throes of awkward adolescence, he mocks, bullies and abuses them. He torments a heavy girl into quitting. He convinces another that he’s sleeping with the kid’s mother. He treats the parents and the adults running the competition with even greater contempt.

Guy is, in short, a tremendous jerk. Exactly how he got to be so and why he’s undertaking this strange mission are the central dynamic of this movie, which was written by Andrew Dodge.

What’s astonishing is that we end up caring about Guy, if not exactly endorsing his cryptic motivations. He even gets to show a poignant side in his relationship with a chirpy little Indian-American kid (Rohan Chand), which starts out with antagonism and morphs into something like tutelage.

If you’re up for a bracing film about the joys of being bad, this is it.

Video extras are short in quantity but long in quality. There are deleted and extended scenes, a making-of documentary titled “The Minds and Mouths Behind Bad Words,” and a feature-length commentary track supplied by Bateman.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Bad Words"

"So did your soul burst into flames?"

So asks Guy Trilby, the protagonist of "Bad Words," a pitch-black comedy in which there are no heroes. Jason Bateman, making his directorial debut, stars as a man seemingly without a good bone in his body. He is a racquetball wall of a man, returning contempt and abuse with equal or even greater force. To say he is unlikeable is to suggest that has ever contemplated the notion of seeking approval from others.

Guy is a cipher, a mystery man who appears seemingly from nowhere, 40 years old and untethered, taking a sabbatical from a dull job proofreading warranties to enter the Golden Quill National Spelling Bee. Of course, the $50,000 contest is for students eighth grade and below, but he exploits a loophole to force his way in, a middle-aged man among preadolescents.

And he does not just compete against cute kids, but dominates them, both emotionally and physically. He plays head games and cheats, taunting the heavyset contestants and convincing another that he has slept with his mother. Guy is, in other words, a colossal dick.

The fact that Bateman and screenwriter Andrew Dodge make Guy simply palatable as a main character is quite an achievement, and to say that we actually enjoy following along on his strange, dark journey is quite another.

Guy's exact reasons for taking on this challenge, absorbing untold abuse from parents and bee officials in the process, largely remain a mystery until near the end. Even then, his justification seems not to measure up to the ruckus he's caused, and I think he knows it, but he just wants to make a statement about who he is and how he got to be where he has arrived.

Philip Baker Hall and Allison Janney play the unctuous senior Golden Quill executives who are flummoxed to no end by the prospect of Guy hijacking their prestigious event on national television, and take steps to block his way to the championship.

Guy arrives at the national contest with a reporter in tow named Jenny (Kathryn Hahn), a flustered wreck who has plenty of issues of her own, starting with the fact that she keeps sleeping with the subject of her big story. Guy plays her just like he does the spelling bee, letting out only dribs and drabs of information.

The movie's most surprising turn is Guy's antagonism with an 11-year-old Indian-American boy named Chaitanya Chopra, played brilliantly by Rohan Chand. Chaitanya is chirpy and friendly, a geeky kid but a self-possessed one, who seems to take it as his own personal mission to befriend the middle-aged interloper, despite heaping helpings of politically incorrect insults directed his way. ("Point your curry hole back the other way," is one of the few riffs quotable in friendly company.)

There's more going on with Chaitanya than meets the eye, of course, foreshadowed by his volunteering that his favorite word is "subjugate." But things occur that are unexpected by both man and boy, a dizzy mix of hedonism and male bonding, that somehow feel just right.

Just so we're clear: this is a dark, dark film. It's often very funny, but in the sort of way where you feel bad right after you quit laughing. It's reminiscent in many ways of "Bad Santa" from a few years back, but it actually makes that film seem like a lighthearted romp by comparison.

(That query quoted at the beginning of this review is Guy's tutelage in the proper usage of expletives. Yes, not only do the adults in this movie curse in front of children, they elicit nasty words from the mouths of babes.)

As contests go, spelling bees rank somewhere just below the Westminster Dog Show in terms of the amount of attention given to something so profoundly useless and preposterous. Young students beat themselves to a pulp to learn to spell obscure words they will never employ in their entire lifetimes, at least not if they want to be understood by others.

(If inscrutability is indeed their goal, we save a few places in academia for them.)

In addition to his own poisonous personal reasons, Guy also seems to be pointing out to the world how ridiculous bees are, yet another way in which we push our children to be how we would like them to be rather than affording them the freedom to discover themselves.

That's a pretty sinister bit of subtext for a movie so deliciously good at making us feel bad, laughing all the way to the therapist.

Review: "Identity Thief"

For a movie that's essentially a gender-scrambled version of "Midnight Run," "Identity Thief" is an amiable rip-off.

Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy play familiar types for them -- he the nice, slightly stiff pushover; her the wild girl with an oversized personality and inability to distinguish when she's crossed the line of social decorum, which is pretty much always.

They get tossed together in an unlikely cross-country road trip, one a straight man and the other a charming scamp. We've seen this sort of casting before in "48 Hours," "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" and the aforementioned "Run."

The changeup is the antagonists-turned-buddies  are a mixed gender duo. I'd say this adds sexual tension, except that persnickety Sandy (Bateman) isn't even slightly tempted by the Diana, the plus-sized powerhouse who stole his identity.

The setup from screenwriter Craig Mazin is that Sandy, a drone at a Denver finance company, gets fooled by Diana into giving up his personal data. Soon she's collecting Jet Skis and buying the entire bar a round of drinks on Sandy's dime.

When the police (led by Morris Chestnut) put him in the clink and his boss (John Cho) threatens to can him for his supposed misdeeds, Sandy has no choice but to travel down to Florida, find the woman posing as him, and bring her back to Colorado for a reckoning.

(Actually, there are many other choices, but this is the sort of flight of fancy that demands you gate-check the logic centers of your brain before boarding.)

Sandy, who constantly gets kidded about his gender-unspecific name, leaves his devoted family to embark on this quest. He shows his wife (Amanda Peet) Diana's mugshot, pointing out her size as a way of reassurance. "It's hobbit height. I'm going after Bilbo."

It's an entirely predictable ride, with Diana turning out to be an unstable but somewhat pitiable creature. And she's got bigger troubles than Sandy, with no less than three bounty hunters after her. Robert Patrick is the best of the three, turning it into a personal grudge match when they wreck his clunker van. (The other two, an incongruously pretty pair played by T.I. and Genesis Rodriguez, should've been disposed of in rewrites.)

I got a few special chuckles regarding Sandy's complaints about having to travel to Winter Park, Fla., "pretty much the worst place in America" (and my hometown).

Their initial faceoff is a hoot, with Diana nailing Sandy with a karate chop to the neck -- she's wont to do that -- and giving what is probably the shortest foot chase in cinematic history.

As she did with "Bridesmaids," McCarthy takes a showy role and milks it for all it's worth, showing a sharp sense of comedic timing and a willingness to poke fun at herself. Although little moments here and there, like Diana catching on to the derisive sniggers of the posh set, clue us in that there's more depth than her brash, felonious exterior would suggest.

Director Seth Gordon leads his cast through their paces, never surprising us but nearly always entertaining. "Identity Theft" may be a carbon copy of other, better movies, but this facsimile still pleases.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Horrible Bosses"

"Horrible Bosses" had me, and then it lost me, and then it got me back again. This often clever, sporadically vexing comedy takes the premise of Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" and turns it into a horny goofball affair. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day play three working stiffs who each have what the title says they have. They resolve to kill their evil bosses, with each doing another's boss to throw off suspicion.

Of course, because they're angsty modern men rather than calculating killers, they mess the whole thing up and get into a bunch of comedic scrapes -- or one big one, depending on how you count it.

I enjoyed the set-ups as we meet the bosses, learn the trio's personalities and how they mesh. The section where they slowly come around to the idea of offing their supervisors, try to find a hit man and ultimately resolve to do the deed themselves isn't very funny, and seemed to go on and on.

Director Seth Gordon and his trio of screenwriters needed to give this script another wash or two.

But once the movie hit its stride during one long night of hi jinks, it's a decent enough laugh-fest to garner it a marginal letter of recommendation.

Bateman, the rare child star who turned into a fine adult actor, has a very specific sense of comic timing. He usually plays variations on the same character -- the precise, easily perturbed and slightly anal-retentive nice guy who is vexed by the vagaries of others. In this case it's Dave Harken, played by Kevin Spacey riffing on his "Swimming with Sharks" character. Bateman plays Nick, who's been busting his hump for eight years to land a promotion ... one guess if he gets it.

The archenemy of Kurt (Sudeikis) is his boss' son, a coke-head with a horrid comb-over played by Colin Farrell. When the old man bites it, the son is put in charge and demands that people be fired to squeeze more profits out of the company to fuel his partying. Sounds like some newspaper executives I know.

Most people would not acknowledge Dale's (Day) problem as a real dilemma. A recently engaged dental technician, Dale is being sexually harassed by his dentist, Julia, improbably played by Jennifer Aniston. Julia's favorite trick is to knock her patients out with gas and then try to grope her subordinate.

My problem with these bosses is that they're all cartoons. They do not exist anywhere outside a Hollywood screenplay. Take Aniston's Julia. She could have any man she desired, so why would she pick on the short, hirsute and excitable Dale? It's like she has a hobbit fetish or something.

Farrell's character, Bobby, has the potential to be the most interesting, with his complete lack of empathy for fellow humans and a house crammed full of pinball machines and paintings of himself. ("A douche bag museum," Nick dubs it.) Unfortunately, the movie spends the least amount of time with him, so don't get to know him well enough to truly hate him.

Spacey's a treat playing nasty, since he does it so well. Jamie Foxx turns up as a heavily tattooed con with a colorful name.

"Horrible Bosses" isn't horrid, and sometimes it feels like punching a clock. But there's more good than tedious, and having to watch it didn't make me hate my job.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Paul"

"Paul" is quite possibly the first extraterrestrial stoner comedy. At least, I couldn't think of any others offhand. I Googled "movies in which aliens get stoned" and got zippo. Maybe I should've used Bing.

The alien and his human cohorts do not actually spend the entire movie getting high, but this film definitely has a crunchy road-trip vibe. Think "Cheech & Chong" meets "Starman," with some "Shaun of the Dead"-type genre spoofing. This latter flavor is not surprising, considering that "Shaun" collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost wrote the screenplay and star in "Paul."

The title character, a buggy-eyed protagonist who can turn invisible and heal people and animals with a touch, is voiced by Seth Rogen in his blowsy, cool-dude mode. We get the distinct impression that on his world, he's the Jeff Spicoli. At least, we hope he is. Paul (a nickname, and later we discover how he got it) crashed his spaceship in the desert more than 60 years ago, and seems to have little ambition or direction in life.

He's been the guest-slash-prisoner of the U.S. government ever since, and would've been content to stay there until he recently learned that he's outlived his usefulness. He goes on the lam, smashes his stolen car and gets a lift from Graeme and Clive (Pegg and Frost), a pair of British nerds taking a tour of Area 51 and other alien-themed hot spots in a rented RV.

There's a lot of funny in-jokes about why all aliens in pop culture have the same general resemblance as Paul. He tells them the government disseminated those images so in case more of Paul's folks show up, people will at least have a frame of reference and not totally freak out. There's even a hilarious flashback where Paul gives Steven Spielberg the idea for E.T.'s glowing magic finger.

Hot on his trail is Zoil (Jason Bateman), a Secret Service agent who's really serious about his job, and seems impervious to humor. He takes orders from a female boss we only hear over the phone, and has to deal with a pair of nitwit rookies (Joe Lo Truglio and Bill Hader) assigned to help.

Paul, Graeme and Clive hide out in a trailer park, where they bump into Ruth (Kristen Wiig), the daughter of a Bible-thumper. She wears those odd glasses with one frame blacked out to conceal an eye condition, and it doesn't take special powers to guess Paul will have something to say about it.

His intervention helps her cling a little less bitterly to her religion, and soon Ruth is tagging along, determined to try out some new swear words and maybe break a few commandments. It's a charming, cheeky and funny role, and underlines the burning necessity that Hollywood give Wiig her own star vehicle, now.

"Paul" is directed by Greg Mottola, who helmed the ridiculously overrated "Superbad," but also the criminally ignored "Adventureland." Together with Frost and Pegg's script, they manag to find a loose, entertaining groove that's way funnier than "Pineapple Express." The humor is generally in well-traveled terrain with a generous helping of dick jokes, but somehow having it coming out of the mouth of a little green man makes it fresh and ironic.

3 stars out of four

Review: "The Switch"

"The Switch" is a lot smarter and sweeter than its premise, which sounds like something out of a horndog sex comedy: A guy swaps his sperm out for the donor's when his best friend decides she wants to get pregnant sans marriage. I can just see this movie being made by the Judd Apatow crew, with Seth Rogen as the clueless ersatz dad.

But instead the movie stars Jason Bateman, whose comic sensibilities are more nuanced. He plays Wally Mars, a sad-sack who secretly pines for gal pal Kassie, played by Jennifer Aniston. Officially this is a Jennifer Aniston movie, but Bateman is the real star. And it's less a romantic comedy than a humorous character exploration of Wally.

I particularly liked the scenes between Bateman and Thomas Robinson, who plays his son Sebastian (though neither of them knows this initially). Wally got raging drunk at the Kassie's insemination party -- apparently there really are such things, at least in New York City -- and spilt the spunk delivered by hired gun (pun intended) Roland (Patrick Wilson). Desperate, he decided to, ahem, grasp hold of the situation and substitute his own offering.

Wally remembers none of this due to his extreme inebriation that night, which eventually brought him to the doorstep of his boss, babbling something about "trading Diane Sawyer to the Vikings." (Watch the movie; it actually makes sense.) The boss is played by Jeff Goldblum, in a small but delicious turn filled with terrific comic timing.

Fast forward seven years. After decamping to Minnesota, Kassie has decided to return to the Big Apple with her son, Sebastian, who's like a mopey little Mini-Me of Wally. Sebastian collects picture frames for a hobby (keeping the sample photos of strangers, for whom he constructs elaborate backstories) and frets about the dogs held at the kill shelter. He even does the same little moan-y thing Wally does when he eats.

Wally immediately notices these similarities, despite having just met the kid, while Cassie, who's been around him for every day of his six years, somehow does not.

The interactions between Wally and Sebastian are the best thing about the movie, favorably recalling "About A Boy," where a tenuous relationship grows between a child and a man who is many ways still one himself. Recognizing that Sebastian is super-smart, Wally speaks to him like a regular person, rather than that condescending "I'm-the-grown-up-here" tone most of us unconscious take.

Wally: "You want to tell me about your new school?"
Sebastian: "Why?"
Wally: "Because you're a kid and I don't know what else to talk about."

Despite having her name first in the credits, Aniston is really the supporting role here, and she fills it out nicely despite there not being much there on the page. (The screenplay is by Allan Loeb, based on a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides.)

Of course, there is the inevitable moment when Wally, having finally convinced himself of the truth about Sebastian, must confess his deed to Cassie. This is where the movie does conform to tired convention, as the plot becomes a series of delaying tactics until the truth is revealed, at which point, like a snowball rolling downhill, it has acquired so much weight that cataclysmic occurrences must result.

Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck previously helmed the dimwitted Will Ferrell (but I repeat myself) movie, "Blades of Glory." "The Switch" may look like another dopey comedy, but it walks and talks like a bird of an entirely different feather.

3 stars out of four

New podcast up at The Yap

This week's show is about child actors who went on to have successful careers, such as Jason Bateman in this week's "Extract."

Review: "Extract"

If you were to turn in "Extract" for a screenwriting class, it probably wouldn't get a very good grade.

The latest from writer/director Mike Judge ("Office Space") doesn't really have much of a structure. The characters just sort of flit in and out of the story, appearing when they have something amusing to offer, and disappearing when they don't. Nobody learns any important lessons, or changes fundamentally as a person.

As the film opens, a bunch of misfit characters are working at an extract factory, and at the end they're still plugging away making vanilla, cherry and root beer flavoring.

And yet, they're an entertaining enough bunch that we feel like the visit was worth stopping by. The movie doesn't have a huge number of gut-busting laughs, but plenty of gregarious chuckles.

Jason Bateman plays Joel, the owner of Reynold's Extracts. He's got a nice car, a big McMansion and even the possibility of General Mills making a bid on his company, which would allow him to retire early with a nice pile.

On the negative side, Joel's love life isn't going so well. His wife (the wonderful Kristen Wiig, who's not given enough to do here) has set an unofficial 8 p.m. sweatpants deadline: If he doesn't get home by 8 to make his move, on go her frumpy sweatpants and out goes any chance of amore for the evening. It's become a pattern, so Joel spends most of his nights down at the local bar, venting his frustration to Dean (Ben Affleck), the slightly crunchy bartender.

This all probably would have continued as is, except for two new developments. A freak accident at the factory causes Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), the bossy sorter harboring dreams of promotion to floor manager, to lose a testicle (actually both, but they manage to reattach one). And Cindy (Mila Kunis), a sexy girl grifter, takes a job at Joel's factory in search of a score.

Joel pines for Cindy, but is too much of a mensch to cheat on his wife, so one night in a drug-induced haze courtesy of Dean, they launch a scheme to hire a gigolo to seduce Joel's wife, thus freeing him up from any guilt trip about having his own affair. Meanwhile, Cindy shacks up with Step and convinces him to sue the company. And things get progressively more daffy from there.

There's a wacky and yet somehow plausible host of minor characters. J.K. Simmons plays Joel's right-hand man, who can't remember the employees' names so he refers to everybody as "dingus." Gene Simmons shows up as Step's slimy TV lawyer, who offers to drop the lawsuit if Joel will allow his own manhood to be slammed in a door.

For anybody who's ever worked in a blue-collar setting, Judge's collection of prickly personalities and overblown conflicts feels spot-on. Tying it all together is Bateman, playing a basically decent guy who accidentally drives his life off a cliff one day.

Here's a warning: If a really hot girl acts like she's interested in something extremely boring, watch your wallet.

3 stars