Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Beneath the Surface
I had never heard of this movie. But in my Communications graduate course, the teacher showed the first five minutes of it and I thought it was hilarious. Then one of my co-workers recommended it and I tried to watch his copy, but it was bootleg and after 28 minutes, it flipped out on me. So I was determined to see this movie. How unfortunate. The movie is about a frustrated office worker who moves up in the company after going under hypnosis and after still being unsatisfied, he decides to steal from the company when his friends are fired. There are so many problems with this movie I don't know where to begin. For the first 40 minutes of the movie, I cried laughing. Everything was totally true and I loved it. But then when he moved up in the company, the movie became very stupid. #1 If the hypnosis really worked, he wouldn't be able to snap out of it until going to another psychologist. #2 The only black people portrayed in this WHOLE movie were some guy selling stuff on the side of the road, a lawyer who knew all about jail (hmm...wonder where that idea came from?), and a magazine salesman who portrayed himself as a crackhead, a hustler, and later a software promoter. He blackmailed the main character into buying forty subscriptions of Vibe (how ironic) and was never seen again. I find it hard to believe that in an office that big, they felt that no blacks needed to be cast. But the production cast felt it absolutely necessary to throw in rap music with the n-word and "Monkey ass" in it whenever possible--during the beating of a copy machine, at the beginning with the "down" co-worker, any bad scene, rap music was played. That annoyed me on so many different levels--that and whomever the rapper was! #3 The system they used to steal money would definitely be blocked in a real workplace environment. There's no way that three people could use that system and get away with it. #4 Maybe I fell asleep, but how did the accident with the building happen? I still didn't catch that. #5 The love interest in the restaurant was right on point though! And like I said...the first 40 minutes were great. The rest of the movie should've been thrown in the garbage and I wish I would've stuck to the 30 minutes I saw on bootleg.