Employee of the Month (2004)

Well, this movie was a near complete waste of time.Employee of the Month tells the story of David (Matt Dillon), a man who loses his job at a bank and his fiancée in the same day and heads back to work with a gun stuffed in his pants. And it's a comedy. Along the way we meet David's Bachelor friend Jack (Steve Zahn), one of those crazy guys who rants about everything. We also stop by a strip club for some gratuitous nudity, watch Jack steal jewelry and money off of dead accident victims, meet David and Jack's gay friend who's lost his dental license (Dave Foley), find out David is cheating on his fiancée Sarah (Christina Applegate) with her best friend Wendy (Andrea Bendewald), meet an extremely accommodating hooker (Jenna Fischer), watch a completely inexplicable dream sequence about David foiling a bank robbery, learn why David is badly burned on the left side of his body and suffer through a massively out-of-left-field twist ending that just goes on and on and on and on.Employee of the Month is an example of one of the great banes of the modern viewer. Production values on films are so high, they all look and sound so good, you've actually got to pay attention to them to realize how bad they are. But the more you focus on them, the worse they are to sit through. If you just sort of half pay attention to this movie, it might not seem so terrible and you might actually be caught off guard by the big twist at the end. But the more closely you watch it, the worse it gets.Firstly, Matt Dillon is horrible in this film. There's only one single moment in the entire story where he makes David seem like a remotely real person, and it comes way at the end while you're already being assaulted by the awesome WTF quality of the twist.Secondly, the writing isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is. The story is all about making you think David is one sort of person, then literally telling you that he's just been pretending to be that person, then "shocking" you with the sort of person David actually is. But instead of making the character a puzzle the audience has to gradually figure out, the filmmakers just cheat. They simply throw new information about David into the story without building up to those revelations or connecting them to anything else. And the twist ending is one of those bad twists which doesn't make you look at everything you've seen in a different light. instead, it says "Hey! There was actually a bunch of stuff going on that you didn't see and it completely invalidates what you've just watched! Sure, it doesn't make any sense…but it's so clever!" There are a couple of good things in the film, namely the performances of Steve Zahn and Christina Applegate. Zahn gets to chew the scenery with gusto as Jack and Applegate manages to be the most believably human character in the entire story.Employee of the Month isn't just a bad film. It is one of those movies that when it's over, you will say out loud (even if no one else is around), "Why did I waste my time with this thing?" I had to stick it out to write this review. Trust me, you don't need to bother.

'1' might seem an unduly harsh rating for this movie. After all, there are probably worse movies out there. But as far as i am concerned, if a movie is so bad it leaves you depressed and hollow inside, mourning the precious precious time that could have been spent memorizing the first 100 digits of pi, it is bad enough. The back of the box already gives you a warning. "A film in the style of the Cohen Brothers" it claims. When will i ever learn? I don't believe I fell for that. Real filmmakers don't want to be compared to other contemporary filmmakers, they want to stand on their own. A Cohen Brothers film compared to this is like comparing a Mozart symphony to a car alarm. This was one of those movies which attempts to be witty and edgy, the pitch was probably something like "The Bigh Lebowski meets Fight Club". For example, there is a scene where the main character is fired by his boss, and he pulls a gun on him. Then, big surprise, its revealed that never happened outside his imagination. The problem is that the boss was so cartoonishly odious that pulling a gun on him seems like an understatement. The scene fell flat, it wasn't surprising or shocking in the least. The dialog is peppered with attempts at wittiness and edginess, unfortunately it uniformly fails to be either. For instance, there was a little exchange that went something like: "His name is Fred Thomas." "So has two first names?" "Yes, what's your point." "No point, just making an observation." This little exchange had no point other than to bask in its own wittiness. Handled well, this might have been a barely acceptable stab at Pulp Fiction-like verbal interplay. It wasn't, it was so painfully awkward and unfunny that i felt embarrassed watching it. The movie is full of hollow and pointless "edgy" stylistic touches, like random pauses and fast forwards. The soundtrack slavishly plays to current teenage trendiness. The 'the dude' analog was shill and obnoxious. I haven't mentioned the plot, because it is not worth mentioning. Very very little happens before the pathetically contrived series of twists at the end. Avoid at all costs, not seeing this movie is worth at least $75.

The film has its moments. It's got a rather nice plot. It's first-person commentary is interesting. Matt Dillon and Christina Applegate have both done quite well. The sequence before the bank robbery was very stylish and funny. It's sound editing is perhaps below average but the music is okay.It's got endless plot twists in the end. After the first major twist I said to myself "Well, that's clever..." and after the second I was like "Wow! never saw this coming" and the twists continued on to a point where I got rather irritated. Plot twists are supposed to offer surprise elements in a story to see it from an entirely different point of view. But in this film, surprise is stripped off.

David Walsh (Matt Dillon) has a perfect life: a gorgeous fiancée, Sarah Goodwin (Christina Applegate); a beautiful house; a fancy car; a job of manager in a bank. On the day he expects to be elected "The Employee of the Month", he is fired; Sarah finds that he had an affair with his colleague Wendy (Andrea Bendwald) and calls off their engagement; and a hooker sent by his friend Jack (Steve Zahn) to stay with him in a motel steals his car. On the next day, in his farewell, there is a heist in the bank and he is abducted. But his fate before reaching Nirvana has not finished yet.While watching "Employee of the Month", I was feeling the story very unpleasant, mostly because of the disgusting character of Jack, and also because of the jinx of David. But suddenly, the story twists with an outrageous and surprising plot point, becoming the perfect bad day of David a masterpiece of black comedy. When I first saw Matt Dillon partially burnt in the beginning of the movie, I believed the actor had had some accident, and only later it was disclosed that the scars were part of his character. The unknown Andrea Bendwald is really a very beautiful woman and has an important participation in the conclusion of the story, inclusive along the credits. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Dia Perfeito" ("The Perfect Day")