The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 9, 2022

Any movie fans who are old enough to remember vestiges of a bygone age like the daily print newspaper that would be delivered to the front door may recall the excitement of seeing ads populated with images of an Oscar and a listing of nominations after the yearly announcements were made. Back in those days, there weren't any entertainment focused cable channels, and even news coverage in papers of the nominations tended to be kind of hit or miss, with (at least in this reviewer's personal experience) virtually no complete listings of which films got nominated in which categories. It was always exciting, then, to see films that may not have even had a wide release yet getting trumpeted for raking in huge amounts of nominations, something that of course may have sparked potential viewer interest in a title. In that regard, it might have been fun to have seen the kind of ad campaign The Good Boss may have come up with back in the day, since it ended up getting a record number of nominations at the Goya Awards, Spain's equivalent to our Academy Awards. In fact its ultimate Goya wins for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Original Score would be the kind of haul which would have pretty much guaranteed a lot of press had those awards been handed out at the Oscars. All of this said, it may actually strike some jaded American types as a bit unusual that The Good Boss should have had such an impact in Spain. It's a smart and often sharply written black comedy of manners and one might say corporate intrigue, but it really doesn't seem to be the type of "blockbuster" that would corral an armful (or two) of awards.

Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is the apparently avuncular owner of a scale business he inherited from his father, and the film opens with him giving a pep talk of sorts to his assorted employees, since Blanco Scales is a finalist for a regional business excellence award that Julio is very interested in receiving. This seeming moment of celebration, or at least preparation for celebration, has a bit of chaos happening in the background which isn't exactly clear right away, though it's ultimately revealed that Blanco Scales has just fired a hapless guy named Jose (Óscar de la Fuenta), who has not taken the news well and who in fact has brought his two small children to the factory so that a middle manager can tell them why their lives are about to take a sudden socioeconomic downturn. This is just the first of several "clues" provided that suggest that Blanco Scales is not exactly balanced, so to speak.

And in fact it's here and in similar elements where The Good Boss may simply be too "on the nose" for its own good. There's another, perhaps even more blatant, example that recurs throughout the film, which provides Julio a number of vignettes with the factory's parking lot security guard enforcer, but which revolves around a kind of factory gate installation that is a scale, which keeps getting set askew, including by a rare bird attempting to nest there (which Julio frightens away with a honk of his horn without blinking an environmentalist eye). If the subtext, or at least a central metaphor, of The Good Boss is on the obvious side, the film does go in some interesting directions in terms of depicting just how off balance Julio has become.

On one side of the kind of "moral scales" which are perhaps somewhat similar to the legendary Egyptian myths of yore featuring Anubis and Thoth, The Good Boss shows Julio actually doing good, as in his efforts to help the thuggish son of a very elderly employee. He also attempts to offer some counsel to an addled employee whose father helped Julio's father found the company. On the minus side of things, Julio is an unrepentant sexual predator who has a history of bedding young female interns at the company. Interestingly, The Good Boss shows all of these efforts leading to their own kind of disaster.

The Good Boss never quite achieves its darkly comic aims, but it at least comes close on occasion, and the entire effort is buoyed by the suavely smarmy performance of Bardem, who is like one of those snake oil salesmen of old, a kind of charmer you know is taking advantage of you, but you simply don't care. There are probably too many sidebars here for the narrative's aims to achieve sufficient momentum, and a number of plot threads are introduced and then kind of go missing in action. The film features a structural device which offers interstitial text cards announcing each day of the week, which really doesn't add anything significant to the story.

The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Good Boss is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. As tends to be the case with Cohen releases, there's no real technical information imparted on the cover, and unfortunately as of the writing of this review the IMDb is only listing lens information on its technical page. I similarly haven't been able to dredge up anything authoritative online. All of this said, this is a sharp and appealing transfer of what I'm asssuming was a digital capture finished at 2K. There's not a lot of visual "wow" to this film, but it offers it naturalistic aspects very well, with fine detail emerging precisely on everything from Bardem's wrinkled face to some of the textures on fabrics of costumes and furniture. There are some interesting slightly blown out moments in the factory which seem to be emphasizing the garish fluorescent lighting, but even here detail levels penetrate surprisingly well. Things may not be quite as fulsome in a couple of very dark scenes, including a kind of horrifying opening vignette showing a vicious beating in a park (which is actually a hate crime once it's more or less explained), which can be seen in screenshot 18.

The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Good Boss features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options in the original Spanish. Kind of like with the video side of things, the film's sound design isn't ever overly "showy", and that may result in the fact that the stereo track will suffice perfectly well for many listeners. That said, the surround track can open up the soundstage, particularly in some of the cavernous factory scenes, and even in some of the outdoor vignettes involving Julio, the fired employee and the security guard. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. In the broken record department, this is another release of a foreign language film by Cohen where the English subtitles are forced, not optional.

The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Javier Bardem and Fernando León de Aranoa from Contenders Film: International Courtesy of Deadline Hollywood LLC (HD; 8:23) is an online affair moderated by Nancy Tartaglione.


• Interview with Javier Bardem and Fernando León de Aranoa from Contenders Film: Los Angeles Courtesy of Deadline Hollywood LLC (HD; (9:33) is a kind of hybrid with Javier Bardem appearing live at a screening and de Aranoa appearing remotely.


• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1:48)

The Good Boss Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I kind of wanted The Good Boss to take one of two arguably hyperbolic, gonzo tacks: either try a purely farcical route, where despite Julio's best efforts, everything falls apart for him; or, alternately, a really dark and disturbing approach which would more fully depict Julio's moral turpitude. As it stands, I'm not sure the "shades of gray" approach The Good Boss takes ultimately helps it to achieve its desired aims, but it's nonetheless often a bracing character study and Bardem is really excellent throughout. Technical merits are solid, and The Good Boss comes Recommended.