Corporate Animals Review
Lucy (Demi Moore) is the egotistical megalomaniac CEO of Incredible Edibles, America's premier provider of edible cutlery. In her infinite wisdom, Lucy leads her staff — including her long-suffering assistants, Freddie and Jess (Jessica Williams) — on a corporate team-building caving weekend to New Mexico. When disaster strikes, not even their useless guide, Brandon (Ed Helms), can save them. Trapped underground by a cave-in, this mismatched and disgruntled group must pull together in order to survive. Amidst sexual tension, startling business revelations, and casual cannibalism, Freddie and Jess emerge from Lucy's shadow. Hilarious and sometimes shocking, the laughs and gasps mount as these Corporate Animals are unleashed.
R: Pervasive language, sexual content, some gore and brief nudity
Studios: Screen Media Films, Snoot Entertainment, Pacific Electric, Protagonist Pictures
Runtime: 1 Hour and 25 Minutes
Director: Patrick Brice | Screenwriter: Sam Bain
Cast: Jessica Williams, Karan Soni, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Martha Kelly, Dan Bakkedahl, Calum Worthy, Jennifer Kim, Nasim Pedrad, Ed Helms, Demi Moore
Release Date: September 20, 2019
It’s nice to see notable supporting actors step up into leading roles. Within this large ensemble, it was great to see Karan Soni showcase his talents in a feature where his presence is prominent, along with actress/comedian Jessica Williams. Out of this cast, I found myself slightly amused by them. Plus, it’s nice to see Demi Moore let loose as a bitchy, self-centered control freak. She got to step out of her comfort zone and she’s good given the material she’s working with.
On another positive note, the movie is short. It’s an hour and 25 minutes long so by the time you say, “Okay, this sucks,” it’s all over. Then again, I said, “Okay, this sucks,” 30 minutes into the film after not receiving a single laugh. I received three chuckles throughout the entire duration of the movie, but goddamn were they sporadic.
It doesn’t take too much for me to be entertained. It doesn’t take too much for me to laugh. I can list the many universally-panned comedies of the decade that I thoroughly enjoyed (probably because I was a young and stupid adolescent and now I’m a big adult baby), but wow, I can’t believe how unfunny Corporate Animals is. It just goes to show that great actors can’t make a weak comedic script work. The last time I learned that lesson was 2016’s Why Him? This was my second reminder.
The story is plain and simple: an office team goes on a hiking trip with their egomaniac of a boss and find themselves trapped underground with no means of escape for several days, leading them to revert to the rules Darwinism, which then leads to cannibalism. It’s a pretty funny concept for a 20-minute short film, but the movie is nearly an hour and a half and most of the humor’s mileage runs thin.
You have this set of characters who are all completely unlikable and they feel like lesser clones of characters from The Office. Hell, Ed Helms from The Office is present here and even he’s unfunny, making jokes that are all mean-spirited and mocking relevant subjects, such as sexual harassment, while saying shit like, “She Weinstein-ed me”. From the set-up to the delivery, it all falls flat, which is a shame because it’s a waste of all these comics’ talents. I’m all for crude humor, but the jokes here are so specifically set on making pop culture references, using tropes from other R-rated comedies (such as the animated hallucination sequence), and over-the-top bloody violence and they simply miss the target each time. The film is written so broadly and doesn’t have many, if any, spurts of energy to sustain its short runtime. If this was a series of shorts on a half-hour comedy show, this concept would’ve worked. When it gets to an area regarding cannibalism, the film finds its footing and somehow manages to beat that joke into the ground.
Corporate Animals is a disappointingly unfunny dark comedy which features a great cast whose talents are wasted on such a thin script aiming for the most basic of audiences.
