Office Christmas Party Review: Holiday Raunch-Com Is Lump of Sh-t in Your Stocking

Talk about holiday buzzkill. Office Christmas Party sounded like it would be just the right raunchy timewaster the season needed, an Animal House rager without a thought in its shitfaced noggin. Instead, this pooped party brings you down from all the jokes that dont land and the flop sweat pouring off good actors whose forced cheer is exhausting.

T.J. Miller so good on Silicon Valley, so lost here plays Clay, the doofus whos been running the Chicago branch of his familys tech company into the ground. His Grinchy-as-hell sister, Carol (Jennifer Aniston), intends to shut the place down after Christmas if her brother cant come up with a money-making fix. The chief technical officer Josh (Jason Bateman) puts his head together with whipsmart co-worker Tracey (the always and forever watchable Olivia Munn) to devise a plan to revolutionize the Internet. Are you feeling the weight of the plot here? The setup it took six writers to construct it weighs a ton, especially since o-directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) put the slow into the term slow burn.

Clay, said to have the mind of a drunk baby, thinks the solution to financial ruin is to throw a huge Christmas party. Great idea; that will surely make the plot go away. But it doesnt, even when someone loads a snow machine with cocaine, even when a stick-ass potential client (Courtney B. Vance) snorts a nose full of blow and swings from the rafters, even when a dude dressed as Jesus rides through the party on a horse, even when sharp comic minds like Kate McKinnon, Vanesa Bayer, Rob Corddry and Randall Park work tirelessy to build laughs in a vacuum. We long for a genuinely demented farce and get only desperation.

On the periphery, however, there are two killer performances: Fortune Feimster as a newbie Uber driver with a mouth on her, and Jillian Bell as a pimp whose smile can turn from merry to menacing on a dime. What do their characters have to do with the plot? Nothing, which is maybe why they score so many laughs and hint at the wild thing that Office Christmas Party could have been if it didnt take itself so damn seriously. Bummer.