Losers in a Warehouse

  • Title: Employee of the Month
  • IMDB: link

Employee of the MonthGreg Coolridge needs to be removed from Hollywood.  The writer of the Sorority Boys gives us a lame script and a lack of direction with his newest flick Employee of the Month.  Well if you loved Sorority Boys you are in for a treat.  For the other 99.9% of you out there you might want to stay away.  No, it’s not as bad as Sorority Boys, but for some insane reason I put the bar a little higher than merely watchable, and this one doesn’t measure up.  Yeah, I don’t think we need any more from you Mr. Coolridge; don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Zack (Dane Cook) is a box boy at Super Club, a Costco-type wholesale super-store.  He lives with his grandmother (Barbara Dodd Ramsen) and spends his days at work goofing off with his friends Iqbal (Brian George), Lon (Andy Dick), and Russell (Harland Williams).  The guys hang out in their secret club house behind the stack of unmovable merchandise, play Texas Hold ‘Em, and do as little work as possible.

The favorite of the store is Vince (Dax Shepard) who is the best checker in the region.  He’s so great in fact legions of hot babes show up to cheer him on daily.  Riiiiight…  He has his own Sancho Panza named Jorge (Efren Ramirez), and he’s won employee of the month 17 straight months.

When Amy (Jessica Simpson), a new checker who rumor has it likes to date the employee of the month, shows up, Zack decides to work hard and give Vince a run for the title and the girl.  But how will his changed attitude effect his friends?

Here are some questions, in no paticular order.  Where, in all the world, do checkers at Costco have groupies?  If the groupies are as attractive as Amy, or even hotter in most cases here, why is she the only one pursued?  Why isn’t Vince dating his groupies?  If Vince is such a terrible date, as we learn on Vince and Amy’s first outting, how does he keep his groupies?  I know it’s a comedy but is there any store in the world that would employ the nearly blind Lon as an eye techinican or Semi (Marcello Thedford) as head of security?  And why is it that Amy, or any female in the store for that matter, doesn’t have a chance to win employee of the month?  Is she too busy moisturizing her chest?

All of these are problems, among many others, that screenwriters Coolridge, Don Calame and Chris Conroy fail to touch on.  Instead we get fart jokes, a grandmother using inappropriate sexual humor (God, I’ve never seen that before!!!), and shot after shot of Jessica Simpson’s breasts.

The film wants desperately to be Office Space or Waiting…, but with it’s tone, lame plot, and lack of laughs it comes off more like BASEketball (with Simpson instead of Jasmine Bleeth).  The fun from Office Space and Waiting… came from characters that understood they were stuck in crappy jobs, but learned how to make those jobs work for them.  Here, for some reason, the same crappy jobs are worshipped on a pedestal.

Cook does what he can with the role, but he lacks Ryan Reynolds’ comic timing that made Waiting… work so well.  As for the rest of the cast, well the screenwriters didn’t spend anytime developing their characters, so I’ll do what they did and just leave them alone.  In the end there’s just not a lot here to enjoy, or even watch.  It might make a fine 3:30 a.m. flick on Comedy Central, but for a theatrical film it fails to live up to the job description.