Office Party – Office Christmas Party (2016)

Directed by: Josh Gordon, Will Speck | 105 minutes | comedy | Actors: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, TJ Miller, Kate McKinnon, Jennifer Aniston, Courtney B. Vance, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Sam Richardson, Karan Soni, Jamie Chung, Abbey Lee

The stars of the hit series “Friends” know all about what a regular role in a wildly popular comedy series can do for your career. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Le Blanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer worked before the first episode – ‘The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate’ aka ‘The One Where It All Began’, aired in the US on September 22 1994 – all already in the film and television world, but their career and popularity gained momentum thanks to the success of the series. After almost ten years, ‘Friends’ came to an end and a new chapter in their careers began for the six stars. All of them had minor or major successes, but they quickly lost their superstar status (by the end of the series, all six actors were paid a million dollars per episode!). Only Jennifer Aniston seems to have survived the ‘post-Friends’ period quite nicely. She regularly appears in films – mostly romantic comedies – and although these are not high-quality works, they score like a charm at the box office. However, sometimes it seems that Aniston takes on a certain role solely because she needs money. Roles in films that don’t boost your resume, but take the shine off. ‘The Good Girl’, one of the few films with Aniston in the lead role that gets a good enough score on IMDb, dates back to 2001. With ‘Office Party’ (originally released as ‘Office Christmas Party’, 2016) she does not make any definitely a good turn.

That is not necessarily due to Aniston himself. It is mainly the film itself that makes us bend our toes. You have to love the party comedy, of course. ‘The Hangover’ (2009), ‘Project X’ (2012), ’21 & Over’ (2013) and a whole host of ‘American Pie’ spin-offs; if that’s your thing, you’re probably laughing at the underpants fun that Josh Gordon and Will Speck (the guys behind ‘Blades of Glory’, 2007) are throwing at their viewers here. The Chicago office of technology company Zenotek is not doing too well. Perhaps that’s because manager Clay Vanstone (TJ Miller) is one of the ‘long live fun’ type. When his hard-core sister Carol (Jennifer Aniston), CEO of Zenotek, gets wind of this, she threatens to evict 40 percent of the Chicago office employees. And just before Christmas! Clay and his right-hand man Josh Parker (Jason Bateman, colorless as ever) team up with the firm’s tech brain, Tracey (Olivia Munn), to hatch a plan to save the company from destruction. To appease a major lender (Courtney B. Vance), they invite him over for a sizzling Christmas drink – or well, a Christmas spectacle, complete with DJ, reindeer, a lost Jesus figure, ice sculptures and the whole rambam. Carol has expressly forbidden organizing a Christmas drink, but she will be abroad all weekend…

You probably already feel that the company party is getting completely out of hand, with booze, drugs, sex, whores and a seriously injured potential lender. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Carol turns up unexpectedly. ‘Office Party’ cannot be accused of originality or unpredictability. Not about clever jokes, by the way, nor about a compelling story. All the obligatory elements have been crammed into the wafer-thin plot: office romances that got out of hand, lost bales of money and chases starring shady Eastern European characters. Three people worked on the story, and three more wrote the screenplay, but none of them saw that the film is too flat for words. All those writers were probably thinking, ‘We’re stuffing the movie with non-funny side characters at a bombastic Christmas party, so no one will notice how shabby the story really is. Then we will probably also get away with humor of the level: sit on the copier with your bare buttocks and then print…!’. Skip that bite!