The Good Boss holds the record for the most nominations for a single film at the Goya Awards, Spain's equivalent of the Oscars. Out of its 20 nominations at the 2022 ceremony, it ended up taking home six awards: Best Picture, Best Actor for Javier Bardem, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Fernando León de Aranoa, Best Editing, and Best Original Score. Somewhat controversially, Spain selected the film as its official selection for the Best International Feature Oscar, beating out the more critically acclaimed Parallel Mothers. Despite these accolades, however, The Good Boss is an underwhelming movie.

Perhaps The Good Boss appealed to the Goya Award voters so much because it's a movie about desperately trying to win awards. This satirical comedy follows Julio Blanco, the boss of a scale factory who treats his employees as "family" and thus feels way too comfortable prying into their private lives if it means he can get everything in order to win another award for his business. As satire, it's clever. As both comedy and drama, however, the film is seriously hurt by poor pacing. It might be a big award winner, but that doesn't make it a great film.

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The one aspect of the film that truly rises to the level of award-worthy greatness is Javier Bardem's performance as Julio Blanco. Bardem is an actor equally at ease playing affable and villainous, and in The Good Boss, he gets to do both at the same time. Blanco is, for the most part, soft-spoken and ingratiating, even when it's clear his actions are pure manipulation. The rare moments his familial mask cracks are captivating; a single glare of his can turn a calm moment instantly tense.

Various issues come Blanco's way in the week before the big awards assessment. In an obvious bit of symbolism, the factory's scales haven't been perfectly balanced lately. A recently laid-off employee is staging an over-the-top one-man protest just outside company property. Anti-immigrant xenophobia is boiling up in the factory and has already led to violent hate crimes in the nearby city. Productivity is being impacted by workers' relationship woes, which Blanco takes it upon himself to investigate all while engaging in his own illicit affair with one of the young interns.

The Good Boss spends a lot of time setting up these various plot threads -- too much time, really. While there is a lot of plot to set up, the script quickly becomes repetitive in re-emphasizing these various situations. The biggest problem is that, except for some moments in the protest, none of the subplots in this supposed comedy are actually very funny.

When these disparate threads finally come together right before the final assessment, the story gets more interesting in terms of both having something to say and giving Bardem richer material to work with. Even so, it feels like too little too late for the film to truly succeed in its comedic aims. Other anti-corporate satires have made the same points with more laughs and greater entertainment value. Its brilliant central performance aside, The Good Boss ends up feeling like a rough draft for a much better movie than the one that broke award nomination records.

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