Office Christmas Party

Nothing nothing awkward or cheesy. Perfectly paced, perfect characther building in such a short amount of time. Perfectly timed and subtle jokes and pretty great acting.

Even the hundreds of extra's were flawlessly directed.

Good laughs and no restrictons. They went all out in a very un-American way.

Kudos to the director.

I dreaded seeing this. My daughter rents many videos on Redbox, but we consistently shot her down when she would bring this one up to rent. She finally rented it anyway. We sat down to watch it and I was ready to just play games on my phone until it was over. I was pleasantly surprised. It was not as bad as the reviews would lead you to believe. Comedy is a very relative, personal thing. What someone finds funny, someone else would not. I have strange taste in comedy. I like physical, silly comedies, but also intelligent satire, I'm kind of all over the map when it comes to what makes me laugh. This one, about a software company on the brink of failure, was pretty good. I laughed several times. It was a little long for a comedy, I feel they could have edited some scenes better. Two hours is too long for most movies, especially a comedy. I liked most of the characters and thought they did well with the script they were given. It's not rocket science, but it was entertaining and I'm glad she rented it.

I understand why people might be down on this movie but I really enjoyed it. It had the right elements of the great party comedy. Great cast. Great party. Maybe I really enjoyed it because I was drinking along with it and wanted it to be good. But is that such a problem to have? It did feel like it couldn't quite hit the punchline as well as I wanted it to. But if you want to have fun with it you will.

If you study film, you know that entire texts have been written on the importance of "grounding" in a script.

The ground, also known as the glue, is the character that the viewer finds most relatable, most sympatico, when the story itself starts fray around the edges. Which is not to say that all scripts require a strong ground or glue, merely that the more outrageous scripts, the scripts with the least internal cohesion, require as much ground as they can get.

Which brings us to OFFICE XMAS PARTY, one of the more blatant examples of a "spaghetti on the wall" script. In other words, not a lot of fine tuning was done to get this baby ready for shooting day. The writers just took every gag they could think of, threw it against the wall, and then waited to see what stuck.

Some of it stuck, most did not.

But Bateman and Munn hold the film together by holding the attention of the viewer. In fact, they are so effortless at it that, every now and then, for just a split second, you almost think they are acting in another movie entirely, a romcom in which they are the only characters, and you are imagining the other 400 extras in this overdone extravaganza.

Is it funny? Not really. This reviewer laughed exactly once.

Is it engaging? Well, because of Bateman and Munn, actually it is.

I was looking to watch a funny Christmas movie that isn't Elf or A Christmas Story so I gave this a chance since I really like Jason Bateman and I can say I was entertained throughout the whole thing. It's not the greatest movie ever but it checked the boxes I was looking for while watching. It's definitely stupid humor but it gave me a few good laughs