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Employee of the Month

0 stars

Directed by Greg Coolidge

Written by Don Calame, Chris Conroy and Greg Coolidge

Starring Jessica Simpson,

Dane Cook and Dax Shepard

Classification: PG

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad. Entertainment journalism is prone to excessive, look-at-me language, but not this time. Employee of the Month is an old-fashioned, super-duper drag of a film.

What makes it even more appalling is a sequence that occurs near the end of the film. A disgruntled male cashier stands in the middle of an empty room, head slightly down, eyes tilted upward as the camera stealthily approaches. It is a classic Stanley Kubrick shot. You see it in The Shining as Jack Nicholson slides into murderous psychosis; you see it again in Full Metal Jacket when a new recruit (Vincent D'Onofrio) cracks during boot camp. So when the same shot turns up in Employee of the Month, you know two things. One is that the youthful hack (Greg Coolidge) who directed the film has seen a lot of movies, some of them very good and therefore "knows better." The second thing, of course, is that he doesn't care.

Let's get to the story. Zack Bradley (Dane Cook), a young man with hair like a raccoon pelt (read scruffy and adorable), works in a giant grocery store as a box boy. Formulaically, he has three loser buddies who serve -- depending on how you see these things -- as lowbrow comic relief or as a marketing strategy to attract a wider audience or as tiresome nincompoops (my vote). Zack is pushing 30 and lives with his salty-tongued grandmother. How come he's working at such a crappy job? Turns out years ago, when he had fire in his belly, he lost a lot of money on the dot.com market and never really lifted himself off the canvas.

Where he works, the grocery store, is dominated by a wizard cashier, a blond, slim-hipped bully named Vince (Dax Shepard). He's the store star, customers line up to watch him swipe and toss and bag. He also scores, we're told, with all the female cashiers. That's not an impossible situation except Vince seems, at least to this reviewer, happily gay. And so the notion of his bedding down any pretty girl much less all the pretty girls in the store has a slightly dissonant ring to it.

Never mind. Into the arena of wilting spinach and fluorescent light comes Amy, a new employee; she makes her entrance in slow motion, like a teenager's vision of a heck of a good time. It's pop star, actress (The Dukes of Hazzard) and tabloid queen Jessica Simpson.

Rumours have preceded Amy. She has, so the box boys whisper, a sexual thing for guys who win the Employee of the Month badge. So the race is on. Zack, the underachiever versus Vince, the "lady's man." If you think about it; there's a kind of classical arrangement here, two guys, good and evil, competing for the big prize. Of course, in the film's final, strangling moments, there's a showdown between them. Beowulf and Grendel, so to speak, on duelling cash registers. It's hard to imagine anything sillier.

With her convictionless face, Simpson seems a sweet enough soul; she can't act, not even a teeny tiny bit, but what makes her forgivable is that she doesn't seem to have any illusions that she can. Her job is to flash her unnaturally white teeth and her ample bosom and watch a whole bunch of rent-hungry actors embarrass themselves in scene after scene around her. And they do. Fart jokes; mortifying "reaction" shots; astonishing dialogue: "You're a dink!"

One goes to a film like this knowing it's going to be junk but thinking, "Well, there may be some laughs along the way. Intentional or unintentional. Terrible movies can be fun." But not this one; it's simply too depressing that people sat in a boardroom, read this script and said, "We're ready to go!"

Years ago, this reviewer flew to Winnipeg to watch Keanu Reeves in a stage production of Hamlet. For 20 minutes, it was a delight, Keanu in a pair of tights, droning monosyllabically through some of the loveliest poetry ever written. But the smiles fell away as one realized with escalating horror that Hamlet is a 3½-hour play and there's no escape until the end. (Now who's the joke on?)

Employee of the Month produces something of the same response. The lights go down in the theatre, the friendly hum of chatter subsides, people snuggle into their seats; the film starts; but before long there's a collective realization that this nonsense is a hundred minutes long, and that the sound you hear, that faint ticking, is your life passing. Minutes you will never have to live again.