Film Review: Employee of the Month

Unfortunately for Employee of the Month, even Jessica Simpson's low cut t-shirts and excessively pouty lips can't rescue a film suffering from forced humor and poor acting. It's bad enough to center a film on a bulk-retail store employee of the month competition. Add a script seemingly constructed from the personal jokes of a group of pre-pubescent boys, and things aren't looking good.

In the latest comedic flick to boast a lack of intelligence, Dane Cook plays "box boy" Zack, a scruffy slacker who lives with his grandmother. When beauty Amy (Jessica Simpson) struts onto the scene as a transfer cashier (right, because Simpson really passes as a retail worker), Zack digs up her file and learns the gal only goes for employees of the month.

Unfortunately for Zack, bleach-blonde archrival Vince (Dax Shepard) has won employee of the month 17 times in a row, and doesn't intend to lose to a miniscooter riding box-boy.

The rest of the cast is composed of vaguely familiar comedians, all of whom act so self-consciously it seems as if they're waiting for the reaffirming laughter of a non-existant audience before they make the next move.

The script is loaded with barely strung together jokes, worsened by the awkward, semi-homoerotic moments, the inclusion of a semi-retarded security officer and a Pedro rip-off by the name of Jorge, who happens to be Napoleon Dynamite's Ephren Ramirez. Cook is a decent actor, but his erratic humor is restrained by the lack of workable material.

The only morsel of humor comes in one of the last scenes-a haphazard retail run-off to test the limits of Zack and Vince's check-out speed. But like the rest of the film, the laughs are wrenched from viewers rather than tickled out of them. If it weren't for the film buzz gathered from the much-ado about nothing Simpson-Cook love affair, Employee would waste away on DVD shelves in the company of The Dukes of Hazzard.