Employee of the Month (2005)

If there's anything to be taken from this jumbled straight-to-DVD release, it's that writer-director Mitch Rouse just loves that flashy slow-fast-slow editing trick, where an ordinary action revs up to triple speed for a few frames, then returns to normal. Rouse uses that trick a good dozen times in Employee of the Month. It has no narrative value, there only to catch your eye. But it does have metaphorical value for Rouse's film, which zips through the important sections, but lingers interminably on dull character development and red herring subplots. Employee of the Month also takes a flavor-of-the-minute approach to its genre, flopping around between black comedy, character drama and heist movie, none of it very convincing. What's more, the title has almost nothing to do with the events of the movie, making the confusion complete. Rouse's cast is the best thing going for Employee of the Month, as Matt Dillon, Steve Zahn and Christina Applegate all try reasonably hard to make the movie work, with Dillon even playing a burn victim -- extra points for seriousness. This is no doubt an attempt to give his character depth, but otherwise, has nothing meaningful to do with the film's themes or anything that happens. A more relevant trait is the fact that Zahn's character perpetrates scams involving the dead or dying -- stealing jewelry from corpses at accident scenes (while disguised as a coroner) and running action on which terminal patient is likely to die first. But it's only relevant because it gets at the mean spirit of this toxic little movie, which thinks Zahn's character is just kind of quirky-funny. Actually, he's the lowest form of bottom feeder. ~ All Movie Guide