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.
