Overall Rating
 Awesome: 22.96%
Worth A Look: 48.15%
Average: 25.93%
Pretty Bad: 1.48%
Total Crap: 1.48%
13 reviews, 57 user ratings
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| Boiler Room |
by Hawkboy
"It's Jim Henson's 'Glengarry Glen Ross Babies'!"
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Remember that movie "Mobsters", with Christian Slater and Richard Grieco playing the great Chicago gangsters? It seemed kinda dorky, didn't it? Well, now imagine a David Mamet play acted out by high school kids and featuring a really terrible rap soundtrack. It's a great script, but you keep waiting for someone's voice to crack.So, anyways, yeah. Ben Affleck is REALLY believable as Alec Baldwin. Let's get that out of the way.
The ever-important plot summary portion of the review: Seth (Giovanni Ribisi) has a really mean dad who doesn't like the fact that he's running a casino out of his basement because his dad's a judge. So Seth becomes a stockbroker, and his dad's still mad, because stockbrokers are evil. Apparently, the whole "Dad, you should be nicer to me" element of the story was the ONE THING that Paul Thomas Anderson cut out of "Magnolia", and the makers of this opus snapped it right up. So we're given an insider's look at what goes on in a "Boiler Room", where evil stockbrokers say things like "Boo-yah!" and snort cocaine and sell Grandma and Grandpa swamp land in Florida. Seth feels conflicted about all this. Deep down, he'd really rather be running that casino.
The scenes inside the Boiler Room itself are electric; there's something very exciting about males swindling other males. But once the film leaves the safe confines of that room that the film falters; there are scenes in bars where stockbrokers get into fights with other stockbrokers because their suits are tacky or something along those lines. The romantic subplot where Seth and Nia Long are shacking up are well-handled, but don't really go anywhere and the filmmakers ultimately abandon it without resolving their feelings. The scenes with the mean dad are just depressing; there's numerous dialogues about parental neglect which have been handled better in numerous other films.
The performances are decent: Giovanni's a little out of his depth; his various crying scenes are a little suspect. Vin Diesel and Nicky Katt (who was so great in the late, lamented "Suburbia"), as co-workers of Seth, do solid work, but are ultimately made into caricatures - Nicky Katt, in particular, is a tremendous actor who creates real energy in the early scenes but then gets bogged down as the "Jealous Ex-Boyfriend" and "The Wrongheaded Boss". Jamie Kennedy is wasted in a nothing role. Ben Affleck - well, the producers knew he was the biggest star in the flick, despite having a fairly small role, so his best lines are in the commercial.
This movie tries to take a "New Jack City" outlook on movies like "Glengarry" and "Wall Street" - as Wesley Snipes watched "Scarface" again and again, so do these characters with those classics of American greed. But where Snipes' worship of Tony Montana was played for irony (particularily in the scene where Tony's dead body is projected over Snipes bragging that he'll never make the same mistakes), this film just takes the easy way out and says "Hey, those movies rocked."
This isn't a particularily bad movie - it just needs the fat trimmed off. The scenes in the Boiler Room work, but scenes where Seth begins to feel guilty about a guy who got screwed (especially scenes featuring that guy's home life) and especially scenes where we get the stereotypical father-son conflict could have been excised.
And one final thing - what's with the rap soundtrack? Are they trying to market this flick for teens? Yeah, we have a lot of good-looking males in this picture, but they're talking about SEC guidelines, IPOs, Average Down strategies - I saw this movie with my dad, and I needed stuff explained to me. I'm SMART. Teen girls watching this movie will probably spend 90% of the flick thinking, "When's Ben gonna take his shirt off?" The rap music completely negated the ending of the movie:
"I've really grown as a person here."
FADE OUT as music comes up...
"Fuck y'all...Fuck y'all....show your titties...see them titties...nigga nigga nigga...."
An OK movie, but not without some BIG-ASS flaws.And yeah. Tom Everett Scott as the head of the firm. Uh-huh. He's an American Werewolf in Paris. And Jason Bateman's the CEO! Um...Tom...your voice is cracking.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1715&reviewer=27
originally posted: 02/24/00 16:32:07
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USA
18-Feb-2000 (R)
DVD: 04-Mar-2014
UK
05-May-2000 (15)
Australia
12-Oct-2000 (M)
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