Critic Reviews

While he isn’t an unstoppable hitman, the cold capitalist Julio Blanco rivals the most ruthless and calculating characters Bardem has ever portrayed. Even when the film can’t match his strong performance, he still elevates everything with overwhelming ease.

Aranoa has pulled together an excellent cast. But holding it all together is the formidable and always watchable Bardem. His performance makes this satire also a character study.

It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)

I was enthralled with Bardem’s performance, even in the subtle moments. This is important because The Good Boss focuses on him for almost the entirety of its one-hour and fifty-six-minute runtime. The rest of the cast is excellent as well.

The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.

The Good Boss is a pitch-black comedy with a pitch-perfect performance by Bardem, playing prime dartboard fodder for the proletariat.

The cast is uniformly good, but it’s Bardem’s sly, harried performance that powers this overlong, and more amusing than funny, comedy.

Here’s the thing about bad bosses: they rarely realize they are bad bosses. Even if they’re manipulative, inflexible, uncaring, incompetent, out of touch and generally terrible at virtually every facet of the position, they think they’re doing a fantastic job. So it goes with Javier Bardem’s charming, hands-on, seemingly caring Blanco in writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa’s wickedly warped comedy/drama The Good Boss.

In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.

The Good Boss pulls more weight than you’d expect, and Bardem is in charge of the pulling. Here is one of his most packed performances—often funny, yet never engineered for laughs alone, and persuasive in its portrait of an essentially weak soul who persists in dreaming of strength.