In “Horrible Bosses 2,” Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day once again play three amateur miscreants who find themselves resorting to crime in order to strike back at the authority figures who have messed them over.
In the first film, Nick (Bateman), Kurt (Sudeikis) and Dale (Day) were getting back at the title characters, memorably played by Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell, whose coked-up, combed-over baddie was the best (meaning hilariously worst) of the lot.
Lamentably, Farrell’s character could not be resurrected for the sequel, although both Spacey and Aniston show up, spouting their signature arias of abusive profanity and risque sex talk that quickly goes from innuendo to filthily incomprehensible word salad. For their part, the three lead actors keep a saggy snore of a plot afloat through their proven improvisatory chemistry, infusing their characters’ arguments, cross talk and scheming banter with a contagiously stupid-funny fizz that the surrounding movie doesn’t nearly deserve.
“Horrible Bosses 2″ opens with the three guys — newly minted entrepreneurs — visiting a morning chat show in Los Angeles, where they’re scheduled to hawk a souped-up bath faucet called the Shower Buddy. With Day sweating profusely and staring cowlike into the camera, then taking part in a lasciviously suggestive shadow-play sight gag with Sudeikis, the tone is dutifully set: Abandon all taste and high-minded scruples, ye who enter here. If you’re not down with dirty — and more than a few dashes of dimwitted naivete — you’ll be spit out of luck in a drain-circling spiral of cheap laughs, coarse sexuality and sophomoric japes.
In its own way, “Horrible Bosses,” which came out in 2011, hit the sour-sweet spot of the recession-era zeitgeist, tapping into viewers’ feelings of being trapped, tormented and taken advantage of. In the sequel, the bros are battling Big Business — personified by a corporate shark named Bert Hanson, played by Christoph Waltz, and his son Rex, played by Chris Pine — who aim to take over their start-up and turn it into a globalized sweatshop. The point is that, even when the story takes a startlingly violent turn, the dunderheaded protagonists are never not the good guys: Nick and Kurt want to create well-paying jobs here in America; Dale just wants to support his sweet-natured wife and their triplet daughters.
That the dudes of “Horrible Bosses 2” are so well intentioned also means that viewers will presumably forgive a strain of “I’m not racist” humor that reappears throughout the film, which has been directed with humdrum functionality by Sean Anders. Indeed, bizarre, barely coded anxieties about race abound in the film: The guys’ website, Nickkurtdale.com, resembles a noxious epithet when said aloud, and they nervously play up how very white they are compared with their criminal mentor, once again played by Jamie Foxx.
An overarching tone of glib contentment never lets you forget that you’re watching very wealthy, very lucky people coast through yet another check-cashing enterprise in “Horrible Bosses 2.” But even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together. This can’t be accurately quantified — trying to explain why something’s funny is the best way to annihilate a comic vibe. But there’s something about Sudeikis and Day’s sunny obliviousness, combined with Bateman’s long-suffering reactions (at his best as a straight man, he achieves sublimity worthy of Jack Lemmon) that works in spite of the thin material they’re working with.
That’s true even when “Horrible Bosses 2″ goes for the laziest gambits — like restaging one of the most notorious gross-out jokes from the first film — or the most objectionable ones, such as an ill-advised date-rape joke. Taste may be stridently abandoned in what looks to be a thriving if not entirely healthy “Horrible Bosses” franchise. The myriad joys, embarrassments and self-satisfactions of unapologetic bro-hood, however, are not.
One and a half stars. Rated R. Contains strong crude sexual content and language throughout. 108 minutes.
Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.