ReviewKiss My Ass Boss movie review: Crowd Lu is awful in this insufferable Taiwanese workplace ‘comedy’
1/5 stars
Workplace comedies are as old as cinema itself, from Charlie Chaplin being swallowed by a factory assembly line in Modern Times to Jacques Tati navigating an endless sea of identical cubicles in Playtime.
The gargantuan success of The Office, in both its British and American incarnations, was due primarily to the inherent familiarity of its mundane setting and the oddball characters forced to collaborate towards some abstract greater good.
It’s an experience and environment many of us have been forced to endure, and from which just as many yearn to escape.
Kiss My Ass Boss, a new Taiwanese workplace comedy adapted from the comic-book series I’m Mark by director Chu Yu-ning (To My Dear Granny), embodies this sentiment perfectly.
The film tells the story of a long-suffering office dogsbody, condemned to work overtime every night at a bustling advertising agency.
Yellow Huang (left) in a still from “Kiss My Ass Boss”.
Reaching the end of his tether, Mark (Crowd Lu Kuang-chung) vows to commit suicide, at which moment he is visited by Death himself, played by the bald-headed Yellow Huang Hsuan.
Before he can whisk Mark off to the underworld, however, Death reaches the end of his shift and clocks off, leaving Mark to endure one more day.
From there, Kiss My Ass Boss descends into a whirlwind of barely connected vignettes, in which we witness Mark trash the office beyond recognition, only to be mistaken for the owner’s grandson, promoted to CEO, and made fall guy for an insider-trading plot that threatens to bring the company to its knees.
Victoria Chiang in a still from “Kiss My Ass Boss”.
In between all this, Mark must navigate the treacherous waters of office politics, as long-time veterans vie for his job, the office secretary looks to flirt her way into a new power position, and new hire Emma (Victoria Chiang Chi) inexplicably falls for his charms.
Where the film instantly falls down is in Lu’s staggering inability to imbue the protagonist with anything approaching a sympathetic quality.
The singer-turned-actor, who also provides a number of forgettable ballads for the film’s soundtrack, plays Mark as an insufferable, hen-pecked mummy’s boy, with no discernible spine or redeeming qualities, who steadily fails upwards simply because that’s what the script dictates.
Crowd Lu in a still from “Kiss My Ass Boss”.
In addition to being excruciatingly unfunny and narratively confused, the film’s central takeaway is that life is an inescapable grind, so we should strive to find pleasure along the way in the brief moments of shared suffering.
Let potential viewers take heed, however, that this particular episode of communal torture yields no such reward.
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