Nine to Five

Directed by Colin Higgins, Nine to Five follows three corporate assistants (Jane Fonda’s Judy, Lily Tomlin’s Violet, and Dolly Parton’s Doralee) as they conspire to get even with their sexist, misogynist boss (Dabney Coleman’s Franklin Hart Jr). It’s a fairly one-note premise that’s employed to far better and more complex effect than one might’ve initially anticipated, as Higgins, working from a script written with Patricia Resnick, does a superb job of establishing the three central characters and the decidedly toxic environment in which they work – with the pervasively watchable atmosphere heightened by the leads’ uniformly stirring efforts (and it’s clear, too, that Coleman does a superb job of stepping into the shoes of a seriously slimy yet all-too-plausible figure). And although the picture’s been peppered with a number of laugh-out-loud funny gags and interludes (eg the wacky misunderstanding at the hospital), Nine to Five, perhaps hindered by an overlong running time, does suffer from a small handful of ineffective stretches that wreak havoc on its overall impact. (This is especially true of the cartoonish daydreams that arrive somewhere around the film’s midsection.) The crowd-pleasing third act ensures that Nine to Five concludes on as positive a note as one could envision, however, which ultimately does confirm the movie’s place as a seriously affable 1980s workplace comedy.

*** out of ****