I Really Hate My Job

by Marina Pliatsikas | July 1, 2009 09:58 | Edited July 1, 2009 10:00

I Really Hate My Job is a painful and clichéd visit to the cinema which fails to do its job.

"I really hate my job" must have been what the producers and writers said to themselves at the beginning of every day of creating this mediocre attempt at an artsy film. Surely nobody who actually likes making films could have come up with something this bad?

In yet another movie about how crappy hospitality jobs are, I Really Hate My Job follows the evening of five women working in a cafe in London's Soho. The uninventive, directionless plot is punctuated only by shouting matches, Shirley Henderson shrieking her head off, and rats.

Painfully unlikeable, clichéd characters moan on about their textbook-pathetic lives, while Shirley Henderson shrieks her head off some more, and Neve Campbell gets naked (just as the writers, like the audience, sense that the plot really is going nowhere, and think that they had better throw in a nude chick).

I Really Hate My Job tries to be quirky for the sake of it, and the go-nowhere plot and dialogue don't cover a single centimetre of new ground. At one point, one of the characters makes an attempt at being insightful and profound by describing a "career" as "what happens when you lose control of a car on a wet road and it slams into a brick wall." Apply that metaphor to this movie, and you have an accurate description of the disastrousness of it. If you must, see it just for the sepia-toned song and dance sequence performed by Danny Huston in a tuxedo and top hat. Yes, you read that sentence correctly.