Office Christmas Party (2016)

Office Christmas Party arrives in 2016 as a raunchy ensemble comedy with a corporate backdrop and no apparent interest in saying anything about anything. Josh Gordon and Will Speck assemble a cast of gifted comedians, hand them a plot about a Chicago tech branch facing a forty percent layoff, and let the snow-blowing machine do the rest. The result is a film that treats its own premise as a coat rack for gags.

The ensemble is genuinely diverse. Olivia Munn, Courtney B. Vance, Randall Park, Karan Soni, Jamie Chung, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and Sam Richardson occupy the frame comfortably, and the film never remarks on the fact. That is representation by presence, not by argument, and it earns a modest nod without becoming a statement. Jennifer Aniston's Carol runs the company, Olivia Munn's Tracey runs research and development, and Carol carries a real grievance about being passed over in favor of her brother. These are structural facts of the plot, not a thesis. The screenplay lets Carol mention her father's favoritism because it motivates the third act, then moves on.

The layoffs give the story a faint whiff of corporate greed, but the film resolves by landing the deal, restoring the internet, and welcoming the villain into the fold. Capital wins, cheerfully. Nothing here touches race as a subject, nothing touches sexuality, nothing touches the body or the mind or the climate or the historical record. The humor runs toward the crude and the physical, and moral instruction is nowhere on the agenda. This is a competent, overstuffed, mildly exhausting comedy that wants only to make us laugh and succeeds at a rate of about forty percent. It is a Christmas party. We attend, we drink the punch, we leave.