Employee Of The Month

What-you-see-is-what-you-get can be cool. No, maybe not cool. Comfortable.

Club Super, or Super Club, depending if you are dyslexic, is a vast warehouse shopping thing. You go there and buy everything you ever wanted for the home in huge amounts, like tubs of hair gel and a trillion rolls of bog bumph wrapped in cling. It scares you to look at it. This is Wal-Mart on steroids.

People work here and this movie is about them. They come in two shapes and one size, except for the boss of bosses, who is a midget, but that’s a little person joke that slips in between the big ears gag and the farts.

Size 1 is Vince (Dax Shepard), who has won Employee of the Month for 16 consecutive months. If he wins one more, he takes away a brand new car and the right to flaunt his nauseous personality on the stairway to Much Higher Management. Right now, he’s a cashier, or rather Top Cashier, which means he’s a till monkey with speed skills.

Size 2 is Zack (Dane Cook), a stubbled charmer who has honed his slacker techniques to a fine art and has absolutely no interest in this employee show-off rubbish, preferring to hang out with his poker playing buddies up in their secret den atop a stacking tower. He breaks every rule just for the hell of it, insults his superiors in such a way that they don’t get it, and couldn’t care less if Vince mocks him for being a box boy, Super Club’s no-perks dogsbod. Work for him is avoidance and he knows all the tricks.

Everything changes when Amy (Jessica Simpson) arrives as the new girl on the tills. She has a rep from her previous job for sleeping with Employees of the Month. Vince double ds into gush gear and Zack suddenly takes up the Employee challenge. Needless to say, Amy is sex on legs.

As a comedy in the 40 Year Old Virgin category, this is pretty tame. The characters are not given a chance to expand beyond their stereotypes, with the possible exception of Zack, who has the unfair advantage of being played by an actor who is watchable and the least ugly of a rough bunch. Simpson is in danger of becoming the Jayne Mansfield of the Noughties, if danger it is. She bulges in all the right places, has a melt-me-now smile and a blonde mane that would have Pamela Anderson howling like a banshee. She doesn’t have to act; she just has to be. Shepard, as the joke villain, acts too much. If going over the top was the new craze, he would be way out in front. As it is, excruciating might be too kind a word to describe his performance.

The film is so predictable, it stops being acidic and becomes as appetising as Scooby-Doo's lunch pail.