“MANAGEMENT,” you’ve sure got working women down pat. Why don’t today’s lady professionals realize that what they really want is a creepy, weird guy stalking them from coast to coast?
Jennifer Aniston plays Sue, a bitchy Baltimore sales rep who does the soul-crushing work of selling “corporate art” — cheesy landscapes suitable for motel rooms (ha, ha). In a dumpy motel in Kingman, Ariz., the dorky, painfully awkward night manager, Mike (Steve Zahn), hits on her by bringing her bottles of wine every night and asking if he can share them with her.
Instead of reaching for the pepper spray, slamming the door or simply saying, “No, thanks,” she goes along with it. Prepare for “When Harridan Met Slobby.”
The film is a failure if it can’t convince us that these two people belong together. It can’t, and barely tries, because its characters are mere types meant to illustrate the blankness of corporate life and how desperately it needs zany free spirits to show it the way.
The more alarming Mike’s behavior becomes — after their fling in the desert, he shows up uninvited at her office in Baltimore — the more whimsical the movie thinks it is. (She tells him he’s being wildly inappropriate, then invites him to her soccer game five seconds later.)
It’s not hard to see what’s in this for Mike. He seems like a guy who’s never undressed a woman before. As for Sue, she gets . . . a low-income loser from the other side of the country? She couldn’t find one on the East Coast? Women who look like Jennifer Aniston can do slightly better.
Yet Sue’s other option is a raging psycho who, as played by Woody Harrelson, provides the few almost-amusing moments in a comedy that, for me, yielded zero laughs. (There is no wit, just snide observations such as “Zoos suck” or “Solitaire — great game.”) Harrelson’s an ex-punk and yogurt mogul with a shaved head and neck tats who wields an assault rifle loaded with BB pellets.
Sue, though, is a winsome soul whose dream is to run a soup kitchen. In an age when sensitive anti-corporate creative guys dripping with poetry, good intentions and degrees from Oberlin warm the couches at every Starbucks, why can’t she find one?
No reason. There’s no reason for anything else, either. No reason for Mike to parachute into the Harrelson character’s swimming pool instead of knocking on his door. No reason for Mike to suddenly be befriended by a Chinese-American guy who works at a restaurant in Washington state and instantly offers Mike a job and friendship. No reason for said restaurant worker to have a Brooklyn accent. No reason for Mike to spend about five minutes training to be a Buddhist monk, except that it puts “Management” over the 90-minute mark.
One last no reason: No reason to watch this movie.
MANAGEMENT
As fun as a corporate manual.
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex). At the Empire, the 84th Street, the Angelika, others.