[5.8/10] What a weird film. This plays like a kids movie for adults, one that wants to address sexual harassment and equality for women in the workplace while also engaging in wackier *Home Alone*-style hijinks and revenge schemes. There is, at least, something ambitious about trying to marry the high-minded aims of an adult-skewing release with the comic sensibilities of a flick made for twelve-year-olds. But I’m not sure who the audience for this movie is -- people who care deeply about feminism but also want to see it channeled through a live action *Looney Tunes* cartoon?

Alright, that actually sounds awesome, but *9 to 5*, sadly, is not. It’s a jumbled up film that channels real life social and workplace ills (some of which are downright chilling) and packages them with zany broad comedy, contrivances, and misunderstandings. At various times, the movie is a down-to-earth exploration of the challenges women faced in offices across the country, and at others, it’s an over-the-top farce. Either choice is fine, but the movie never decides on one and weakens both approaches.

The best you can say for the film is that its heart is in the right place. However cockamamie its efforts to get from A-to-Z, it highlights the plight of women like Violet, Doralee, and Judy. The stealing of women’s ideas while passing them over for promotions, the toleration of sexual harassment, and the resistance to ideas that would make working life easier for women are all key to the message of the film, even if they eventually take a backseat to wacky almost-poisionings and long-term hogtying. *9 to 5* doesn’t take much seriously, but it suggests that correcting these problems wouldn’t just be good for business; they’re also the right thing to do.

The film channels that message through its tremendous cast, whose talents aren’t always used to the fullest. Lily Tomlin nearly steals the show as Violet, the long-suffering supervisor who’s remarkable at her job but whose gender keeps her from climbing the corporate ladder. Dolly Parton brings a tremendously fun energy as Doralee, the regularly-harassed secretary who’s sweet but formidable. Even Dabney Coleman -- who has to play the most odious character in the film, the main characters’ sexist bigoted boss, Mr. Hart -- brings an extroverted bent to the hypocritical jerk, making him memorable, if a thousand miles away from likable. These assets are occasionally squandered on goofy setups and off-kilter schemes, but they liven up the movie on a scene to scene basis.

The script is also surprisingly sound for one that spins out of control after the first half hour. Small mentions of the famed Chairman of the Board and his Brazilian escapades come back in a big way in the film’s climax, with his browbeating of Hart in the name of “teamwork” bringing things full circle from his similar treatment of Violet. Violet installing her garage door opener isn’t just a character-establishing moment to show her capabilities; it sets up the women’s restraint mechanism for Hart. Even the strange alignment between the main trio’s boss-beating fantasies and the real life equivalents is clever. At various points in the movie, the plot just kind of floats away into insanity, but the bones of it are surprisingly solid for such a shaggy, out there flick.

That loopiness makes it seem worse for its efforts to use this approach to tackle some very worthwhile issues. It’s hard to put oneself in the mindset of a 1980 audience member (especially if you weren’t born then.) But Hart’s actions feel way more sinister and disturbing in the modern context, making the way *9 to 5* uses his shtick as fodder for Bugs Bunny-style screwball vengeance into something uncomfortable, to say the least. Even his strung-up restraint system plays differently given the grimness with which a similar rig was deployed in *Breaking Bad*. To be frank, there is some dark shit in this movie, but it plays pretty much everything as light and fluffy, or at least as exaggerated and wacky, which leads to a strange tonal dissonance for the modern viewer.

It’s also just not terribly funny. The film’s best laughs come from the dialogue and the performers. Tomlin’s facial expressions and Parton’s threats to turn Hart “from a rooster to a hen” represent the great comic timing and amusing turns of phrase the film has at its disposal. But all too often it jettisons both for crazy, implausible setups like accidentally stealing the wrong corpse or trying to prevent your ex-husband from seeing the elaborate way in which you’ve abducted your boss. The film aims to earn most of its laughs through its crazy situations, but they’re largely chuckle-less and leave the whole movie feeling tonally off balance.

To be frank, I spent much of this movie with my mouth agape going, “Who would do this?” Sometimes, that was directed at the people making the film, who thought that a boss wrestling his secretary to the ground after she rejects his propositions could be part of a light comedy instead of an element of irrepressible horror. Sometimes it was directed at the characters, who seem positively blasé about kidnapping and blackmail and other schemes on top of schemes quickly veer into pure insanity. There’s nothing wrong with a little heightened reality in comedy, but *9 to 5* loses its connection to the heart of the characters early and often, rendering the film, at best, a bizarre lark.

The movie is, however misaimed and miscalibrated, plainly well-intentioned. It venerates female friendships in a way rarely seen in mainstream cinema. It has Violet, Doralee, and Judy asserting their independence and capability in different, self-affirming ways. And in a very strange way, tries to give people like Hart a taste of their own medicine and those in the audience the satisfaction of seeing him receive his comeuppance. But all of those noble aims and a toe-tapping title track run aground on a movie that can’t decide whether it’s for five-year-olds or thirty-five-year-olds. *9 to 5* means well, with a commendable message of female empowerment and catharsis, but the film it constructs around that idea was built with tinker toys.