My Boss’s Daughter (2003) review

Dir. David Zucker

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★

In my recent review of Under the Tuscan Sun, I told a story about seeing that DVD in one of my local supermarkets as a kid somehow signaling to my young mind that my family needed to make the upgrade from cassette player to disc player. It really could’ve been any movie, in hindsight, but seeing DVDs displayed at each and every checkout line told me that the sea-change wasn’t merely coming, but was imminent. The other DVD I remember seeing in stock that day was My Boss’s Daughter.

Besides saying it was the first DVD in my collection, there’s little else I can say about David Zucker’s forgotten, mid-aughts comedy that can be deemed a positive.

Zucker’s comedy is so bad that there’s a reason it lives in ignominy, barely a footnote in both his career and that of Ashton Kutcher’s. Kutcher’s star appeal in the mid-2000s was as impressive as anyone’s, but even he couldn’t get people out to see a movie that couldn’t disguise itself: a lousy slapstick-driven comedy spit into theaters at the tail-end of August 2003 in which nobody emerges with anything remotely worthy of their own highlight reel.

Kutcher stars as Tom Stansfield, a hopeless and low-level lackey at a publishing company run by curmudgeon Jack Taylor Sr. (Terence Stamp). One day, Tom finds himself unknowingly flirting with Jack’s daughter, Lisa (Tara Reid). He thinks he’s secured an opportunity to join at her at a party, but through one convoluted and utterly ridiculous misunderstanding, he actually agreed to housesit for her father’s home.

Humbled, if confused, by the gesture, Stamp leaves Tom with very basic instructions that predominately revolve around caring for his depressed pet owl and leaving his immaculately estate untouched. Tis an unfortunate day for these requests, as just about everyone and their brother invites themselves over to Stamp’s home, including Molly Shannon as a disgruntled ex-employee of Stamp’s company, her friends (Carmen Electra and David Koechner), Stamp’s estranger son (Andy Richter), on the run from a lowlife drug dealer (Michael Madsen), who also shows up.

My Boss’s Daughter gets its yuks from a bevy of misunderstandings, such as Kutcher finding a briefcase only for it to break open and reveal a gay magazine for me, and incredulous happenstance, such as an owl diving into a toilet that’s been laced with cocaine. Each appearance from a recognizable comic actor drags them down to levels that likely wouldn’t be seen again until Movie 43. There’s an elderly woman, who carries Evander Holyfield’s ear in a big, a blind paraplegic obsessed with his penis, and a gathering of these aimless types that has them burying a corpse in the backyard of Stamp’s home.

If the film proves anything, it’s that David Zucker, who works off a script from Anger Management writer David Dorfman, works best when aided by his brother, Jerry, and fellow collaborator Jim Abrahams. Without his two cohorts who helped spearhead Airplane! and The Naked Gun trilogy, Zucker is lost in a sea of shenanigans that mistake randomness for humor, and senseless outrageousness for comic timing. Even the R-rated version of My Boss’s Daughter — aka “The Version You Didn’t See in Theaters” — is so tame and toothless for a film that’s very title suggests illicitness that the alternate version quite possibly would’ve gotten the same PG-13 rating as the theatrical version. I haven’t seen the PG-13 version since its initial release, but I’ll say this: it was at least four minutes shorter.

Starring: Ashton Kutcher, Tara Reid, Terence Stamp, Molly Shannon, Andy Richter, Micahel Madsen, Carmen Electra, David Kochner, Kenan Thompson, Jeffrey Tambor, and Tyler Labine. Directed by: David Zucker.