After 15 years of standup, two recorded albums, MTV's "Tourgasm" and being named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2006, Dane Cook finally manages to land a leading role in Employee of the Month. With a B-movie cast including Jessica Simpson, Dax Shepard, Efran Ramirez and Andy Dick, Cook's future career as a comedy movie star seemed set.
Unfortunately, the whole endeavor just plays like a major déjà vu. Cook is making fun of employment at Super Club, a Sam's Club-style megastore, which isn't far from one of his best standup routines where he slams Burger King employees. Simpson manages to say less than five lines in an effort to focus her 10 minutes of screen time on her other assets (a pun explained by her role in The Dukes of Hazzard). Even Ramirez is reprising his Napoleon Dynamite character to play a naïve, creepy kid who idolizes another creeper, played by Shepard. The movie merely comes off like a blue collar Office Space without the effort or humor.
Cook plays Zack, a slacking, yet charismatic boxboy with an arrested development akin to Ryan Reynolds's Van Wilder character. Zack's ability to avoid work while mocking the ambitious Vince (Dak Shepard) with his lame friends in their secret clubhouse hidden in the store's shelves is mildly cute, but it only takes a few fart jokes for the cute to turn disturbing (half of the men are above 40 and one of them is Andy Dick). When they hit the triple digits, I lost count of the very vivid references to balls.
The "plot" starts when Amy (Simpson) arrives. Word around the store is she puts out to the Employee of the Month, so Zack plans to challenge the resident Employee of the Month -- speedy cashier Vince.
They each date her (see Dodgeball for a better version of the same scenes), but winning her heart (okay, her assets) boils down to their competition. Zack looks to his friends for help to win Amy, who tell him he should turn his life around for himself first (all amid fart jokes, of course).
Meanwhile, selfish social-climbing Vince merely bosses around his apparently retarded follower, Jorge (Ramirez) while lusting after another Employee of the Month prize -- a new(ish) Chevrolet Malibu. While he might be just a little evil, you can't help but take his side. Sure, Zack is nice to his grandmother, while Vince picks on Pedro (I mean Jorge), but at least Shepard tries to reach his character's potential, while Cook is obviously just going through the motions, waiting for the next movie script to come.
While Office Space opened wide the hilariously mundane world of white-collar, middle-class jobs, Employee lazily does the same for the lower class cogs in the Super Club machine. No red staplers here -- instead there's a much-talked-about '81 Honda. As in Office Space, Zack also has to make a choice between his slacking friends or making management.
The audience won't care which side Zack chooses because neither side of the one-dimensional throwaway characters is preferable.
Amid a problematic plot (Vince is the region's fastest cashier but his checkouts always turn into time-consuming juggling acts), middle school humor creepily spouted off by 40-year-olds, the producers of Employee of the Month evidently stole Zack's early mantra of "Why bother trying."
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