Review || Office Christmas Party
- Screen Slayer
- Dec 15, 2016
- 2 min read
*Spoilers*
Office Christmas Party has a promising cast but a generic and predictable storyline. It stars Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon and many others. These five are enough to make this film watchable and even funny at parts but the overdone story of the crazy office party is like flogging a dead horse. The plot follows Clay Vanstone (T.J. Miller) and Josh Parker (Jason Bateman) as they attempt to save Parker’s family business from his grumpy sister (Jennifer Aniston). In order to do this they must impress Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance) with the world’s best office Christmas party.
To the boy’s credit, they do put on a hell of a party. There are snowman sumo suits, cocaine filled snow machines, a horse-riding Jesus and nudity galore (yay?). The team manage to impress Walter Davis shortly before he accidentally inhales cocaine from he snow machine and ends up in hospital. He is joined by the rest of the gang after they get into a massive car crash after T.J. attempts to drive them all over an open bascule bridge, wiping out the entire town’s internet in the stunt. It’s here that they find out that Walter Davis has lost his job and is unable to save the company after all.
At this moment, Tracey (Olivia Munn) has a revelation about her past few years work at Zenotek. Her goal is to allow people to access wifi from anything with an electrical current. She achieves this absurd objective and returns the internet to the town. In doing this, she secures the safety of the company. It’s obvious that this moment is meant to be inspiring and magical but honestly its hard to care.
Although this film is not to my personal taste, it does have it’s moments. Kate McKinnon is hilarious, as always. She plays the uptight HR representative, Mary. Her constant quirky one-liners and funny mumblings really give the audience something to giggle at.
The cast are all great in fact. They just happen to be working from a generic script. It is a shame to see actors I love in a film that has been done a hundred times. However, they do make the film better. Overall, I probably wouldn’t buy this film myself but it would be to some people’s taste.