The Good: I suppose the acting is fine
The Bad: Not funny, Utterly predictable, Boring, No real character, "Meh"
The Basics: This is a movie that is not funny or not entertaining, but also not overtly terrible.
There's a tough sell for most reviewers to rate things at the extremes. For a film or product to be one star or five stars, it either has to be unredeemably bad or absolutely perfect in my pantheon of ratings. "Average," in my belief, ought to be . . . well, the average. This occasionally brings me problems when it comes to actually placing a rating number on my experience. Sure, I'll debate between a 10 and a 9, but it's rare I give much time to any sort of struggle between a 1 and a 2. Enter Employee Of The Month, a critically unfunny cinematic endeavor that left me with little debate near the bottom end of the spectrum.
Zack Bradley is a slacker working at the local Super Club (a Sam's Club type discount superstore) who has managed to get by without being noticed for years. Vince Downey, the head cashier, has won Employee of the Month for seventeen straight months and if he wins the eighteenth month, he'll win a new car. When a new cashier, Amy, arrives at Super Club and a rumor floats that she has a history of sleeping with the Employee of the Month, Zack gets the impetus he needs to show some initiative and the race for Employee of the Month begins in earnest.
What follows then are a series of witless attempts by Vince and Zack to outdo one another. Both have dates with Amy, giving her the chance to make the choice between them. And Zack has the obvious plot/character path with his friends wherein his quest to become Employee of the Month trumps his loyalty to his three closest slacker friends and he has to make the difficult decision about what is truly important to him . . .
blah blah blah.
Employee Of The Month is so obvious and cliche it's surprising to me that I've even had to debate how poorly to rate the film. Seriously, a third grade student could have written this movie given how conventional the plot is, utilizing all of the obvious competition plot twists and character threads. Its so formulaic one wonders if the mere use of a different setting was what sold the film and if so why.
Employee Of The Month is billed as a comedy and it's clear - especially from the soundtrack - that the target audience is a group of tasteless ten to eighteen year olds who have no sense of what is predictable. But for a comedy, it did not take me long to realize that I was not laughing. I waited for jokes to be amusing, it didn't happen. I waited for a surprise. None came. Instead, the flick relies on such standard and juvenile fare as gay jokes and lines mocking the mentally retarded and in Employee Of The Month they all fall flat.
The closest I came to laughing at this movie was a joke that was telegraphed by Andy Dick. Dick, whose supporting role in the movie is as Lon a character whose sole characterization is a pair of bottle-bottom glasses, plays a near-blind employee who wanders through the movie clueless and lost. At one point, he is at his desk when a customer asks him if he is looking at her breasts. His response is "I don't even know," a line that was criminally obvious moments before it was made, but the closest to funny the film gets.
Beyond that, there's nothing redeeming about Employee Of The Month. It's not funny, it's not well written and the characters are so generic it's almost surprising they bothered to give them names. Indeed, characters this generic have not been witnessed by me since Not Another Teen Movie (reviewed here!).
But the acting is fine. For a group of characters that could be anyone, the acting is fine. I've not seen Dane Cook or Dax Shepard in anything before and I've avoided anything with Jessica Simpson "acting," but they were all fine in Employee Of The Month. The DVD has some behind-the-scenes extras as well as movies from MySpace.com that were - apparently - part of a contest centered around the movie. The acting might not light the world on fire, but it's not bad acting. Indeed, the only one whose acting I noted as too familiar or unoriginal was that of Efren Ramirez. Ramirez played Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite (reviewed here!) and a few scenes into Employee Of The Month, I recognized him because he was playing essentially the same character or giving the same performance here.
With low entertainment value for anyone who enjoys movies and has a sense of humor more sophisticated than the dialogue found at the back of your average elementary school school bus, Employee Of The Month isn't terrible. It's just not good.
For other works with Brian George, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Horrible Bosses
Numb
Ghost World
Keeping The Faith
“Dr. Bashir, I Presume” - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
3/10
Check out how this film stacks up against others I have reviewed by visiting my Movie Review Index Page where the reviews are organized from best to worst.
© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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