Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 3.0
Good until the plot kicks in
This film starts out in a very promising way, offering broadly stereotypical characters in a comically banal work environment. The protagonist's situation resembles that of Ed Norton's character in the brilliant Fight Club; both men occupy boring, empty existences framed by IKEA furniture and jobs of mind-numbing tedium. However, while Fight Club quickly veers into new and exciting cinematic territory, Office Space settles into a formulaic, predictable and utterly inoffensive story about inept white-collar crime.This isn't a terrible movie and, depite relying too much on the single most overused comedic topic of prison life, it does have some funny moments. I'm usually a big Mike Judge fan, but his brand of laziness works far more successfully in a short Beavis and Butthead episode than in this cautious and unambitious first foray into live-action filmmaking.