Movies That Surprised Me: Office Christmas Party

I remember when Office Christmas Party hit cinemas, and I’d planned to go see it. The film looked awful, a little slice of seasonal narrative that was going to be equal parts debauchery and twee, but every time the trailer’s played I kept noticing actors whose work I dug in the supporting cast: Kate McKinnon, Olivia Munn, Courtney B. Vance, Randall Park, Jennifer Aniston.

“It will be terrible,” I told myself, “but it could have some great moments.”

Then life got busy, ’cause it was the holidays, and it’s time in cinemas was incredibly short. There was always a movie slightly more appeal playing at the same time, and I went to see that instead.

Fast forward to last week, when my partner and I settled in for a trashy movie night and scrolled through the new releases on Netflix. Office Christmas Party flashed up, and the graphics were basically Kate McKinnon in a terrible holiday sweater, and my partner was sold on that basis.

“This will be terrible,” she said, “but Holtzman will be great.”

So we loaded up on junk food and put the movie on, and lo….it was almost entirely the movie you expected it to be after watching the trailer.

But–and I’m going to stress this–it’s only almost entirely the film you’re expecting: Yes, it’s about a bunch of plucky office misfits trying to save their company with a massive party; Yes, it’s reliant on familiar jokes about sex, drugs, alcohol, and inappropriate behaviour; and, yes, it’s a film about the evil, soulless corporations being measurably worse than the small, this-is-a-family firm. It’s an underdog-misfit story that has been played out constantly, and problematically, since Porkys and Revenge of the Nerds.

Which is why the film would occasionally catch us off-guard when it would throw in references like the white-straight-male-trust-fund-kid-CEO being aware enough to recognise that he’s basically easing through life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, or pulling off a moment of insight around consent, or race, as they progressed through the usual beats you associate with this kind of film.

These insights weren’t nuanced–in some cases, they were largely hanging a lampshade on things before going for the problematic joke regardless–but it’s interesting to see the way in which conversations around equality are filtering down from high-end think films to the cheap-and-easy holiday filler.

And it also meant that when the film pulled off a really nice bait-and-switch at the midpoint, delivering the climax we expected at the end and veering off in a new direction, we were inclined to follow along with it. By the time Jennifer Aniston’s cold, corporate antagonist busted out some sweet Krav Maga, we were largely onboard with this film being one of the best usages of Aniston in years.

For a film we largely picked to watch Kate McKinnon being cooky and weird between the dross, it caught us off-guard enough to beat our expectations.

At the same time, it delivered exactly the right among of McKinnon being cooky and weird to satisfy.