Hey everyone, Matt here with Bleed Geek Movies’ second installment of Random Movie Ramblings. In this feature Mike and I take turns giving one another movies to watch that either we have never seen before, or don’t really remember much about. In the first installment I had Mike watch the classic Tim Burton film Ed Wood, if you have not read his review yet give it a look. This time I get to watch the 2004 film Employee of the Month, and no this is not the Dane Cook/ Dax Shepard comedy, this is a black comedy drama starring Matt Dillon.
Sometimes the trailers that are shown before a movie plays can be an indicator for what type of movie you are going to see, in this case the trailers (Blessed, Wake of Death, Coronado, and Shadow of Fear, never heard of them? Neither have I, and they all looked awful) should have been a warning that I was about to watch something crappy. Overall Employee of the Month is depressing movie about terrible people doing terrible things to one another, there are no sympathetic characters in the movie everyone is a jerk. The story revolves around David Walsh (Matt Dillon) as his life unravels and falls apart. As the film opens David gets engaged to his girl friend Sarah (Christina Applegate) and he is anticipating a promotion at his job at the bank. David does not get promotion instead he is fired, Sarah dumps him during a dinner with her parents after learning he was cheating on her with a co-worker, his best friend Jack (Steve Zahn) gives him nothing but terrible advice (oh and he makes his living by stealing from dead people). If the movie had simply remained a character study about awful people I still would have hated the movie, but writer / director Mitch Rouse decides to throw in a curve ball towards the end of the movie with a twist about a bank robbery. It comes out of no where, makes little to no sense, and somehow actually made the movie even worse. The film makers even try to show footage during the credits to help fill in plot holes and have the twist make more sense, but in my opinion it just added to the mess that this movie was.
For a movie that is described as a black comedy, it is severely lacking in any comedy. Throughout the films 97 minute run time I did not laugh once, I am pretty sure any hint of smile left my face pretty early on and never returned until after it was over and I watched some 30 Rock just to add something entertaining to my evening before going to bed. When this movie was given to me to watch I was thankful that it was not the Dane Cook comedy, now after watching it I can’t imagine anyway that it could be worse than this. There is no way I can recommend this movie to anyone, I simply hated it. On a scale of 1 to 5 popcorn buckets I am giving Employee of the Month one popcorn bucket. 