My Boss’s Daughter

Directed by David Zucker, My Boss’s Daughter follows Ashton Kutcher’s Tom Stansfield as he unwittingly agrees to housesit for his boss (Terence Stamp’s Jack Taylor Sr.) and subsequently finds himself on the receiving end on various problems and complications. It’s a decent premise that’s ultimately employed to tedious and tiresome effect by Zucker, as the filmmaker, working from David Dorfman’s screenplay, delivers a relatively sluggish comedy that suffers from about as hit-and-miss a vibe as one could possibly envision – with the bulk of the picture’s gags and jokes falling utterly, hopelessly flat. (It’s impossible to see the comedic value in a drug dealer urinating all over Jack’s expensive living room, for example.) There’s little doubt, then, that the picture’s sporadically tolerable atmosphere is due almost entirely to the efforts of an eclectic roster of performers, with Kutcher’s affable turn as the put-upon hero matched by such periphery players as Michael Madsen, Andy Richter, Molly Shannon, and Kenan Thompson – although it’s just as apparent, certainly, that even the most talented of performers would be hard-pressed to breathe life into a progressively desperate screenplay. The end result is an unpologetically broad comedy that simply doesn’t possess the laughs that one might’ve expected and anticipated, which is a shame, certainly, given Zucker’s past success within the genre.

** out of ****