Long-suffering employees of the world, unite. Your spokespeople - Charlie Day, Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis - are back on the big screen.

As Day introduces himself over the phone, Bateman quickly cuts him off: “You don’t have to do that, those honey pipes.” Day responds with: “Well I don’t have an answer, I just wanted to say my name.”  Which then of course leads Bateman into singing the Destiny’s Child hit “Say my Name.”

2011’s Horrible Bosses tells the tale of three pals working jobs under some pretty horrendous managers, played by Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell. The trio of workers arrive at the conclusion that it’d be best if they kill their bosses. Chaos inevitably ensues. The box office reciprocated. Naturally, the idea of a sequel didn’t really surprise the boys. 

“You get asked to do sequels when it makes enough money to warrant it,” Bateman says. “It did really well overseas which is not terribly common for a comedy. New Line and Warner Bros. wanted to do another one and we were certainly open to it ‘cause we had such a good time doing the first one.”

Bateman stresses the trio didn’t want to deliver a film that didn’t live up to the first one. The crew had plenty of discussions about what the sequel’s story would be. For this round, the three start up their own business. As to be expected, shit hits the fan early on, and an investor’s son gets kidnapped for blackmailing purposes.

“We weren’t going to do a movie if we couldn’t find a story that for us made sense,” Day says. “We got to a place where it made sense for us to want to do it.”

Horrible Bosses 2 has raised the stakes with special effects and big name actors. They’ve even got a “fourth musketeer” - their title for Chris Pine - who is with them for most of the film and brings new material to the table. Other fresh faces for the sequel include Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, director Sean Anders (Sex Drive) and writer John Morris (Dumb & Dumber To).

“It’s pretty cool,” Bateman says. “This is kind of a big commercial studio comedy and when you can class it up with some Oscar winners it makes for a nice balanced cocktail.” 

“Sean Anders and his writing partner John Morris are two of the best comedy writers in Hollywood right now, I think,” Sudeikis notes.  

Although they’re famous comedians, they can’t be jokesters all the time.

“We would actually try to simmer things down and get serious to get some work done,” Bateman says. 

All in all the guys just want everyone to enjoy the movie. 

“I’m hopeful that they’re really gonna like it,” Day says. “I expect people to be skeptical but I hope that they’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Horrible Bosses 2 hits the big screen on Nov. 26.

Published in Volume 69, Number 12 of The Uniter (November 19, 2014)