Employee of the Month

The film industry rails against movie piracy and illegal downloads. Then they go and make stuff like Employee of the Month, and expect people to part with their hard-earned dollars to actually watch it. I don’t condone movie piracy – but after watching this film I can certainly understand it.

(Sometimes I wish that movie studios would just issue press releases containing the outlines of such slacker comedies, let us imagine the movie in our heads, then donate the budget - in this case $12 million - to starving children, or cancer research, or even saving the bottle-nosed tree wallabies.)

Zach (Dane Cook) is a box-boy at the local SuperClub buy-in-bulk discount store, cruising around on roller shoes avoiding as much work as possible. But he’s forced to smarten up when sexy new cashier Amy (Jessica Simpson) arrives, and he discovers she’s got a thing for employees of the month. But standing in his way is Vince (Dax Shepard), the store’s resident hot-shot cashier, with the fastest pricing gun in the west. Vince and Zach battle each other for the title, and the affections of the delectable Amy.

Those who thought Jessica Simpson’s denim cutoffs in The Dukes of Hazzard may have been hiding some acting talent will be sorely disappointed. Once again she is simply the eye candy, appearing in a series of increasingly lower-cut tops in order to display her best assets. It’s almost as if it were designed that way to take your mind off the fact that there is nothing going on behind her big brown eyes. Dane Cook is better – he’s an appealing enough leading man, and does a nice line in slacker-with-a-heart-of-gold charm. Hopefully future projects can make better use of his talents. Shepard is probably the best as the OTT villain of the piece, and his double-act with assistant Jorge (Efren Ramirez) provides some of the “funniest” parts of the film. There’s also a nice cameo from Danny Woodburn (known best as Mickey, Kramer’s “little” friend from Seinfeld) as the store’s owner.

With a predictable plot, this is ultimately a rainy-day-the-house-is-clean-there’s-nothing-to-do-and-it’s-the-only-thing-in-the-video-shop kind of film. If it’s worth watching for any reason, it’s for Jessica Simpson’s breathtaking inability to act. And keep an eye out for her changing skin colour – I suspect an overzealous application of California Fantasy spray-on fake tan.