Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

At this point, it’s cliché to say that actors look “unrecognizable” in certain roles but when Colin Farrell appeared as The Penguin in 2022’s The Batman, it was an apt adjective. Sporting a fat suit, gold tooth and facial prosthetics that took hours to apply, his rendering of a mid-level crime boss with an aggressively recessed hairline was strong enough to warrant a lauded HBO spin-off series in 2024. As memorable a role as it’s been for Farrell, it’s not his first time sporting a combover to play a corrupt narcissist in charge. That honor goes to 2011’s raunchy comedy Horrible Bosses, in which Farrell portrays Bobby Pellit, one of the three head honchos that terrorize a trio of hard-working average Joes. “Playing Pellit was all about channeling my inner douche,” Farrell commented in the film’s production notes, and his work as the unhinged heir to a chemical company is a big part of what makes the crime caper work 15 years on.

The opening of Horrible Bosses introduces us to pals Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), and Dale (Charlie Day), who routinely commiserate with each others’ workplace woes over beers. Nick is under the thumb of David Harken (Kevin Spacey), a sadistic executive at a financial firm who belittles and shows contempt for everyone under him. Conversely, Kurt gets along great with his mentor Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) but a fatal heart attack puts his incompetent son Bobby in charge of Pellit Chemicals. Dale gets the least amount of sympathy from his buddies regarding his situation, where he’s sexually harassed on a daily basis by his superior Dr. Julia (Jennifer Aniston) at her dental practice. At the bar one night, the boys take to a cockamamie plan in which they each kill their respective bosses to alleviate the abuse they’re all suffering at the hands of three psychopaths.

If their ruse sounds a bit familiar, it’s a comedic riff on Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train, which is name-dropped explicitly by Kurt and mixed up with Throw Momma From The Train by Dale. They’re aided in their plot by “murder consultant” Dean Jones (Jamie Foxx), who adopts a colorful, tough guy nickname so as to not be lumped in with the 1960s Disney leading man of the same name. Among other actors in Horrible Bosses, Foxx represents the film’s “time at club/impact at club” ratio, wherein performers score lots of laughs with limited screen time. Ioan Gruffudd is a whiz-bang wonder in his cameo, portraying an all-business gentleman whom Dale hires via Craigslist for “wet work” thinking he’s a hitman. Comedy legend Bob Newhart even shows up in the movie’s coda as a seemingly harmless CEO harboring a terrible secret that he asks Nick to overlook with a wink.

Likewise, Farrell is comedically efficient on-screen as Bobby, who is introduced as “Dipshit Cokehead Son” by the movie’s enormous text overlay. We first hear him snorting lines in — and holding up the line to — the company bathroom, from which he storms out and grouses to his dad Jack that he can’t get any privacy. He’s a nuisance that Kurt tolerates in a job he otherwise loves but Jack’s passing automatically puts blowhard Bobby in the big boss’s chair. He rolls it out into the hall to confront Kurt when he’s “three hours late” to work after acting as pallbearer for Jack’s funeral, which Bobby presumably did not attend. The screw-up scion wastes no time taking an axe to his father’s company so he can line his own pockets; “this is just an ATM to me!” he blurts to Kurt in their first pow-wow with Bobby at the helm. It’s made clear that they’re all now residing in the “State Of Bobbyville”, which he revises to “The United States Of Me” soon after.

Being a studio comedy from the 2010s, Horrible Bosses and its director Seth Gordon presumably gave plenty of latitude for the central actors to play around with improv during their takes. But as evidenced by the outtakes over the end credits, it seems Farrell may have taken advantage of the opportunity even more than Aniston or Spacey. The bloopers feature what appears to be a deleted scene involving Bobby’s trip to the pharmacy, wherein he pesters a beleaguered pharmacist with queries like “do you like karaoke?” and “do you have MDMA?” He makes full use of his gross haircut too, heaving his combover as he sneezes into his open hand and shows it to the defeated druggist. Primarily for plot reasons, Bobby’s time in the movie is abbreviated in comparison to Julia and David but as the most crudely exaggerated of the titular heavies, Farrell works hard to sell lines that are designed to horrify.

The actor also contributed ideas toward the conception of Bobby’s garish fashion and ostentatious lifestyle, particularly an affinity for Asian appropriation through nunchuck twirling and Chinese dragon decals. He brags at one point that he’s a green belt and has “Kung Fu Fighting” as his ringtone at a time when people still selected those as extensions of their personality. When our protagonists visit Bobby’s vacant house for recon, they find his man cave packed to the gills with samurai regalia and katanas hung on the wall. They’re possessions of a self-stylized “master of the universe” so obnoxiously self-involved that we can’t really feel too bad about him getting what he deserves. The Julia and David subplots in Horrible Bosses haven’t aged especially well — the former due to its cavalier attitude regarding sexual assault and the latter due to the presence of Kevin Spacey — but Colin Farrell’s performance as the boisterous Bobby makes the horrible hilarious.