Corporate propaganda

Rating: 3/10 (26 February 2009)

An intensely annoying one-dimensional study of perpetual disappointment, culminating in a highly questionable pay-off. Particularly in the wake of a stock-market blow-out of gigantic proportions, engineered by demented greed and unregulated irresponsibility, the depiction of a poor man achieving the status of a card-carrying merchant of pump-and-dump bondage as if he had attained the Promised Land is to say the least nauseating. But to frame the parable in a script that fails to deliver even the ghost of a sub-plot and tells its tale in a monotonous and-then-and-then-and-then series of setbacks with the occasional very implausible advance is a kind of torture. We know that the people behind the cameras are filming poverty from a position of comfortable corporate wealth. The whole movie is a very lengthy commercial for a profession that has contributed to destroying the post-war American way of life. This is corporate Hollywood at its most hawkish: to be avoided like the plague.