Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 3.0
Funny, until the caper starts...
There are a lot of things to like about this movie, especially about how it gets the little things right about the perils of working in an office: the (unavoidable) doorknob that always shocks you when you touch it, the malfunctioning printer, etc. It also nails many of the inhabitants of the corporate world: I've seen the real-life equivalents of every one of these characters in one form or another during my time in cubeland. It also does a great job of capturing the upside-down logic of the corporate world (such as when Peter, who spends his day avoiding work, is promoted, and his hard-working cubemates Michael and Samir get laid off).The trouble with Office Space, though, is that it has trouble sustaining its vision of the workings of corporate hell. This movie is at its funniest for about the first third, when it shows a subtly amplified version of the real corporate world. However, it soon turns into a routine caper movie, and that's where it loses it. The movie continues to take a few jabs at the miserable life that many cube dwellers go through (such as the indignities heaped on Milton, the poor schmoe who is sent down into the roach-infested basement to work), but the parts of the movie where the protagonists are trying to exact revenge on the company (the bulk of the latter part of the movie) are not all that funny becuase they are not very realistic. I wish Mike Judge had come up with a more clever way for Peter, Michael and Samir to stick it to their (former) employer.