Wow! Such a good movie.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It's literally what you expect it to be. An office Christmas party where it goes slightly chaotic towards the end (like all parties should do). The company that our characters work for is undergoing some radical changes by the manager's sibling who is a CEO filled with tyranny and bitterness. In order to save the company, they come up with a plan of throwing a Christmas party for a rich prospect. As always though, things get out of hand. I will say this, it's perfectly enjoyable and fine to watch. Yet the same issues occur with the likes of "The Night Before" and "A Bad Mom's Christmas" where it just feels too random with no focus on a cohesive plot. Don't get me wrong, watching a drugged up man swing from a balcony holding onto Christmas lights is a good time. Even the malicious CEO cursing and destroying the Christmas magic in front of a little girl is amusing. However, when the characters and plot are so bland and formulaic you can't help but feel disconnected. It's another case of random scenes are strung together to gross you out or make you laugh, seemingly more fit into the former category. That, for me, does not make a coherent narrative. Not to mention the various office employees that the plot tried to incorporate. A newly hired worker who has a fetish, a boss who hires a prostitute for the night, an employee who pretends (badly!) to be a DJ...a plethora of minor characters, not enough focus on a substantial plot. If you like your comedies random, then you are sure to like this. Oh, then the typical conclusion arrives where everything is fantastic again. Yay. Merry Christmas. Jason Bateman plays the same character in everything, Olivia Munn was the funniest, Jennifer Aniston was surprisingly good and TJ Miller was fine to watch. The acting was just fine. A few witty lines from the script, but most of the comedic moments are visual. Like I said, it's a fine film but an utterly forgettable one due to its lack of structure and infrequent laughs.

So you don't have to waste much of your time reading this review, and vicariously thinking about this movie, I'll cut to the chase. Unless you're a partying frat boy who spends most of his time on some kind of substance, you should stay very far away from Office Christmas Party. As I am not a partying frat boy, you might be wondering why I watched this terrible movie. I was suckered in by the ridiculous weakness of forcing myself to watch every Jennifer Aniston movie in the world. I thought, since she and Jason Bateman received top billing, it was going to be a Christmas edition of the Horrible Bosses films, which I did find funny. It had nothing to do with those movies; it just happened to take place in an office. Remember that group of boys in college who made student films over the weekend when they were drunk or high, and on Monday when they'd show their creation in class there would be the silence of crickets except for the creators themselves? They'd be giggling hysterically in the corner, remembering how funny their jokes and pratfalls had been at the time. And for some reason, they didn't understand or care that no one else thought their movie was funny, so they went out and did it again the next weekend. Office Christmas Party is a feature-length version of those terrible college videos. More than half the movie takes place at the party itself, and everyone drinks and does drugs to excess. The "shenanigans" the cast performs isn't at all funny to a sober audience who wasn't there at the time of the filming. Much as it breaks my heart, I'm forced to believe everyone involved in this movie has very bad taste.Unless you want to see the voice of Mr. Mucinex in his natural human form, I can't imagine any other legitimate reason for wanting to watch this movie. And I urge you to restrain yourself and content yourself with the preview. You'll only waste two minutes of your life instead of two hours.

Watching this movie is total waste of time. Stupidity, violence and bad actors.

This movie has received some really bad reviews, and rightfully so. Its main crime is taking a very talented cast (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, Olilva Munn, TJ Miller, Kate McKinnon, and Rob Cordy) and just wasting them. With a less stellar cast, you could maybe forgive its shortcomings as people trying really hard. But with this cast of both standup and comedic actors, it should have been much funnier.The biggest crime, as with most failed movies, is it can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a office comedy in the vein of Office Space or is it a gross out comedy like American Pie, or an over-the- top comedy like The Hangover? The movie never settles on one and it fails at all of them.Miller is the spoiled brother of Aniston. Their rich father has died and left them in charge of the company. They don't like each other. Bateman is the IT supervisor for the company and best friends with Miller. Munn is his whiz kid subordinate and potential love interest. McKinnon is an HR rep and Cordry is an office worker. Aniston is the CEO and she wants to shut down the branch of the company run by Miller. Some of it is out of spite and some out a true desire to see the company succeed by cutting costs. She promises not to shut them down if they can land a big account by the time she gets to London on a Christmas Eve flight. That sets the stage for a massive office party designed to impress the rep from the company whose business they need to land.Much like an SNL episode, this is a series of individual set pieces. They are tentatively held together by the idea of the office party. Nothing really makes a lot of sense and the plot has gaping holes in it. The sentimental wrap up was forced, at best.Now, having said all that, I actually kind of enjoyed it. I've always liked Batemen and I have a huge crush on Munn, and their scenes have some great chemistry. Aniston is really coming in to her own as an actress since Friends ended. Her character could have been better written, but her scene in the airport with the little girl and her arguing with the Uber driver had me busting up laughing. Miller can be funny in small doses, but his character just got mind numbing after a while. The plot didn't really have a lot of teeth but some of the individual scenes were funny and you can really see a good comedic film was in there somewhere.This needed a steadier hand directing it than two guys who didn't seem to grasp what makes a comedy a classic.