Corporate Animals (Movie Review)

Sometimes a movie feels like it was created by an algorithm or a mad Lib gone wrong.  Take The Descent, but get rid of anything scary. Swap the group of bad-ass women with a bland imitation of The Office circa season one.  Finally, swap Demi Moore with Steve Carell.  That's pretty much what you get with Corporate Animals.   A movie that sounds like it could be entertaining on paper but fails to live up to the idea.

Demi Moore plays Lucy, the conniving, ego-maniacal, sexually-inappropriate CEO of a company that produces edible utensils.  A promo for the company states, she wants to “Save the world, one bite at a time.”  Her truest nature is shown in jaw-dropping lines such as "If woman cant be as horrible as men, then what is Feminism for?"  The company is in the red so she feels it is prudent to take her handful of employees, consisting of the sexually-harassed Freddie (Karan Soni), the ambitious Jess (Jessica Williams), the selfish jerk Billie (Dan Bakkedahl), and the intern Aiden (Calum Worthy) on a team-building trip so they can learn to work better together for her.  The Office alum Ed Helms plays the guide who takes the group to explore caves.  Lucy insists that they skip the beginner caves and go straight for the advanced ones. As you might expect from this type of movie, the entrance immediately collapses and everyone is stuck inside to fight over precious water, edible utensils, and job titles.

Even at 80 minutes, the plot is stretched paper-thin. There doesn’t seem to have been much of a script since most of the dialogue feels improvised with only a few funny comebacks.  The best gags come late when the group’s sanity has started to deteriorate and things begin to get surreal with the introduction of a talking body wound, an amphibian-induced hallucination, and a mega-celebrity voice cameo.  Ed Helms is usually a reliable source of laughs, but here he’s underused. Demi Moore fares better and does her share of amusing scene-chewing.  Freddie and Jess really are the heart of the movie.  They start as rivals, pitted against each other by Lucy's mind games.  Eventually, they come to a mutual understanding and respect for each other and a loathing of Lucy.  Billie has some funny bits full of the same snark he brought to Veep.  Improv is a double edge sword; it can create spontaneous comedy gold if the chemistry is right.  In my eyes, the cast of Corporate Animals does not have the talent or the chemistry to create the required magic.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of working in an office setting is well aware of all the cliches and sore spots that go along with corporate employment.  Corporate Animals tries to make statements about corporate culture, like miserable bosses, bureaucratic division, and forced social interactions but the jokes never go much deeper than surface level. The filmmakers probably set out to make a black comedy that mixes violence and corporate critique like The Belko Experiment but sadly, in this case, they failed their competency exam.