Entirely unremarkable

Rating: 5/10 (8 June 2011)

Once upon a time there were these places called record stores. People went to these places to buy music. Empire Records is a movie set in such a place. The young employees of Empire Records band together to try and prevent their quirky, independent store being sold to one of those big, bad corporations which will turn the place into a soulless, generic Music Town. If they'd only known the changes which would be coming to the music industry in the next decade they wouldn't have bothered. Anyone up for Empire Records 2: The Day iPods Put Us Out of Business? Eh, probably not. One movie spent with this bunch of unremarkable, unoriginal slackers is enough.
Empire Records is a movie which is overly familiar. We've seen so many similar stories with similar characters. There's nothing to make this movie stand out from the crowd. All the clichéd characters we've come to expect from a movie like this are here. The slut, the virgin, the depressed loner, the artist, the stoner. There's the eccentric guy, the comic relief guy, the father figure. Every character fits into a neat little box. The result is less than inspiring. The movie is incredibly predictable. There's no real drama. Attempts at comedy fall flat. The whole thing seems very unfocused. All the characters have their own little stories. But we never really spend enough time with any of those characters to become fully engaged in those stories. Everyone and everything gets tossed together into a big stew and the end result is underwhelming. Some of the performances are pretty good, with the girls generally coming off better than the boys. Watching this movie it's easy to see why Renée Zellweger, Robin Tunney and Liv Tyler were destined for bigger and better things. The guys though are rather forgettable. Probably the best male performance comes from Maxwell Caulfield playing a washed-up pop star. At least his character adds a little something different to the movie. Otherwise it's all about this group of young slackers, none of whom has an individual story which stands out and whose overriding collective quest, to save the store from corporate blandness, isn't particularly compelling. The best thing the movie has to offer is its soundtrack, a nice mid-1990s musical time capsule. But tossing some snippets from some good songs into the mix, and somehow managing to entertainingly shoehorn Gwar into the plot, isn't enough to save the movie. We've seen a lot of other movies like this one. Most of those other movies have been much better than Empire Records.