Cracks and craic lift Party Office Christmas Party (R16)

105 mins

An easy target to satirise – the dreary and drab work Christmas function – but a tough movie to review. There’s enough potential in the film for it to fly, but enough flaws for it to flop. With the tone and feel of The Hangover (the original, not the dead-horse-flogging sequels), and the originality to match, this time the quirk is turning the saccharine Christmas flick on its head.

A breathless opening 20 minutes aims to cram in a joke every few seconds, before it remembers the need for some plot to hang them off. A bacchanalian Christmas party, the centrepiece of the film, isn’t quite enough. And so things flag for a while, until it regathers enough pace to lurch drunkenly, complete with car chase, to its conclusion.

The guts is that hard-nosed CEO Jennifer Aniston wants to shut down her hard-partying brother TJ Miller’s branch office – just before his annual Christmas shindig. Jason Bateman, Miller’s deputy, is stuck in the middle, trying to save the branch, his boss, a big contract, and the Christmas do.

The party proceeds, but everything else goes awry – leaving Bateman to try to save the day. He’s always a sure touch and everything here pivots on his island-of-calm-amid-the-madness performance.

Aniston is convincing as an icequeen careerist, Miller good fun as a playboy incompetent and the supporting cast play to their comic backgrounds adeptly (fans of the satiric sitcom Veep will spot regulars Sam Richardson (who played Veep‘s idiot savant Richard Splett), Matt Walsh (incompetent PR man Mike McLintock), and Randall Park (hopeless presidential hopeful Danny Chung) among them).

The flaw is that the main plotline is too thin to sustain the movie, and an undercooked romantic side-alley isn’t convincing. – Steve Kilgallon