'Office Christmas Party'

Out Now!

Clay (T.J. Miller) runs a branch of his late fathers company but his sister (Jennifer Aniston) is the ruthless CEO with a grudge to bare and sets him an ultimatum to increase profits or close in the new year. With best friend and employee Josh in tow (Jason Bateman) Clay embarks on a mission to save the jobs of his beloved workforce.
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Unfortunately Clay is something of an emotionally stunted man child and somehow the plan becomes to hold an epic booze filled Christmas party (something his sister is strongly against) to try and seduce a wealthy potential client to save the company. But somewhere between an overly enthusiastic DJ and an unpredictable drug dealer things get out of hand, and the safety of the company seems to be more and more unpredictable with every passing second.

This movie is not nearly as much fun as it sounds. The characters are a nice mix but the story is much too tame and the set up is squandered on a plot that inches up to the line several times but doesn’t have the guts to cross it. On the positive side there’s some good laughs and the main storyline basically concluding about halfway through the movie was a nice twist that actually left me wondering where this whole thing was going, but did little more than waste time as the plot resets making a huge chunk of the movie kind of pointless.
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Whilst this sounds like a classic comedy set up of our heroes battling increasing disaster our characters are never really allowed to fail so the stakes don’t feel real. Problems are solved almost as soon as they appear, characters change their personalities to fit whatever it is they need to do to move the plot forward from scene to scene, and without giving away any spoilers the ending just seems like super convenient nonsense.

An extended segment of the office party turning into some sort of post apocalyptic war zone has a lot of potential but is over before it has a chance to develop. A surreal segue into this kind of thing could have really saved the movie and added some much needed drama, comical though it would have been. Ultimately that’s the problem, the cast are a gaggle of very funny people and the jokes largely land but there isn’t a drop of dramatic narrative to be found and it’s impossible to get invested in anyone or anything.
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This goes double for Bateman and Olivia Munn’s burgeoning romance that plays like the emotional core of the movie but is actually really boring and has absolutely no reason to not work out so what’s the point. On top of that almost all the side plots of the various employees fall completely flat.

​All in all this is more like the Christmas special of a fairly average sitcom without the bonus of you already being invested in the lives of the characters. I’d skip this one as I expect it’ll disappoint.

Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.

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