Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Load of rubbish!!

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Well, this movie was a near complete waste of time.Employee of the Month tells the story of David (Matt Dillon), a man who loses his job at a bank and his fiancée in the same day and heads back to work with a gun stuffed in his pants. And it's a comedy. Along the way we meet David's Bachelor friend Jack (Steve Zahn), one of those crazy guys who rants about everything. We also stop by a strip club for some gratuitous nudity, watch Jack steal jewelry and money off of dead accident victims, meet David and Jack's gay friend who's lost his dental license (Dave Foley), find out David is cheating on his fiancée Sarah (Christina Applegate) with her best friend Wendy (Andrea Bendewald), meet an extremely accommodating hooker (Jenna Fischer), watch a completely inexplicable dream sequence about David foiling a bank robbery, learn why David is badly burned on the left side of his body and suffer through a massively out-of-left-field twist ending that just goes on and on and on and on.Employee of the Month is an example of one of the great banes of the modern viewer. Production values on films are so high, they all look and sound so good, you've actually got to pay attention to them to realize how bad they are. But the more you focus on them, the worse they are to sit through. If you just sort of half pay attention to this movie, it might not seem so terrible and you might actually be caught off guard by the big twist at the end. But the more closely you watch it, the worse it gets.Firstly, Matt Dillon is horrible in this film. There's only one single moment in the entire story where he makes David seem like a remotely real person, and it comes way at the end while you're already being assaulted by the awesome WTF quality of the twist.Secondly, the writing isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is. The story is all about making you think David is one sort of person, then literally telling you that he's just been pretending to be that person, then "shocking" you with the sort of person David actually is. But instead of making the character a puzzle the audience has to gradually figure out, the filmmakers just cheat. They simply throw new information about David into the story without building up to those revelations or connecting them to anything else. And the twist ending is one of those bad twists which doesn't make you look at everything you've seen in a different light. instead, it says "Hey! There was actually a bunch of stuff going on that you didn't see and it completely invalidates what you've just watched! Sure, it doesn't make any sense…but it's so clever!" There are a couple of good things in the film, namely the performances of Steve Zahn and Christina Applegate. Zahn gets to chew the scenery with gusto as Jack and Applegate manages to be the most believably human character in the entire story.Employee of the Month isn't just a bad film. It is one of those movies that when it's over, you will say out loud (even if no one else is around), "Why did I waste my time with this thing?" I had to stick it out to write this review. Trust me, you don't need to bother.

I was on the way to give this movie a 7 or 8, and then the writer went twist-crazy at the end. This reminded me a bit of Fight Club, in that the twisting went too far for credibility to survive. In this case, some of the earlier scenes just don't make sense after the plot is revealed at the end. But the film had some interesting moments, like the reading of the letter at dinner by Applegate - that was funny. And as usual, Steve Zahn does a First Class job of playing the quirky wacko. Zahn must be the first person a director thinks of when he sees this kind of part - Jack Black second. So it lost about two points in the last 5 minutes - I gave it a 6.

The film has its moments. It's got a rather nice plot. It's first-person commentary is interesting. Matt Dillon and Christina Applegate have both done quite well. The sequence before the bank robbery was very stylish and funny. It's sound editing is perhaps below average but the music is okay.It's got endless plot twists in the end. After the first major twist I said to myself "Well, that's clever..." and after the second I was like "Wow! never saw this coming" and the twists continued on to a point where I got rather irritated. Plot twists are supposed to offer surprise elements in a story to see it from an entirely different point of view. But in this film, surprise is stripped off.

David Walsh (Matt Dillon) has a perfect life: a gorgeous fiancée, Sarah Goodwin (Christina Applegate); a beautiful house; a fancy car; a job of manager in a bank. On the day he expects to be elected "The Employee of the Month", he is fired; Sarah finds that he had an affair with his colleague Wendy (Andrea Bendwald) and calls off their engagement; and a hooker sent by his friend Jack (Steve Zahn) to stay with him in a motel steals his car. On the next day, in his farewell, there is a heist in the bank and he is abducted. But his fate before reaching Nirvana has not finished yet.While watching "Employee of the Month", I was feeling the story very unpleasant, mostly because of the disgusting character of Jack, and also because of the jinx of David. But suddenly, the story twists with an outrageous and surprising plot point, becoming the perfect bad day of David a masterpiece of black comedy. When I first saw Matt Dillon partially burnt in the beginning of the movie, I believed the actor had had some accident, and only later it was disclosed that the scars were part of his character. The unknown Andrea Bendwald is really a very beautiful woman and has an important participation in the conclusion of the story, inclusive along the credits. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Dia Perfeito" ("The Perfect Day")