Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis and Jason Bateman star in "Horrible Bosses"
Grab some popcorn! NewsFeed’s Glen Levy brings you the movies you should check out (or avoid) this weekend.
Horrible Bosses
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Tagline: Ever Wish Your Boss Were Dead?
Jason Bateman describes Horrible Bosses as “9 to 5 meets The Hangover,” which may either pique your curiosity or make you move straight on to the next movie below. For those who are still here, director Seth Gordon helms the two Jasons, the aforementioned Bateman and hitherto not mentioned Sudeikis, who are friends with Charlie Day and decide that things would be much better without their employers. How precisely? Simple. Their lives will improve if they end their bosses’ lives.
So look out if you’re Kevin Spacey (he’ll make you down a glass of 18-year-old scotch first thing in the morning), Colin Farrell (rocking a crazy comb-over) or Jennifer Aniston (subtext: women can be mean too, you know) as they play the parts of management who apparently had it coming (somewhat courtesy of Jamie Foxx’s “murder consultant”).
Early word doesn’t exactly lead us to believe that Horrible Bosses, which, if we turn once again to Bateman, “takes full advantage of the R rating,” will come anywhere near challenging The Hangover in the twin senses of generating the same amount of laughs or box office takings.
(LIST: See more on Horrible Bosses in TIME’s Summer Entertainment Preview)
Zookeepeer
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Tagline: Welcome to his jungle.
It sounds more like a joke you’d expect to hear in the movie rather than about it but, silly as it may appear, Zookeeper is actually a high-concept family film. Seriously. The premise is that Kevin James (Griffin Keyes) has his love life given a helping hand by the animals he looks after.
The reason his furry friends start to offer their (possibly unwanted) advice is because Griffin has decided, presumably after much soul-searching, that he needs to move on from what he’s doing if he’s ever going to be able to snag a girl. The one in question? That would be Kate the veterinarian, played by Rosario Dawson; if she to ask you to move on from your job, you’d doubtlessly do so without even stopping to ask the terms and conditions.
But if we’re talking terms and conditions in a Kevin James-starring film, we’re surely only one degree of separation away from Adam Sandler. And so it is, as Sandler voices Donald the monkey (Cher, Judd Apatow and Sylvester Stallone are also on voice duty). But mixed with any on-screen laughter is the sadness from the shoot, which resulted in a giraffe named Tweet dying during the making of the movie. And if that wasn’t bad enough, an elephant used was rented from trainers who have been accused of abuse and cruelty. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) doesn’t approve and moviegoers, for a multitude of reasons, may not either. “You remember nothing,” utters one of the animals at one point. If only that were the case.
NewsFeed’s Flicks Pick: You can tell the studios are releasing movies they wouldn’t want to compete with next week’s Harry Potter finale. In not exactly a standout week, Horrible Bosses gets the job.
(PHOTOS: Animals That Can Think)
Glen Levy is an Executive Producer at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @glenjl. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.