Just get a ruler, drop trou, and be done with it already

reviewed Thu, 10 Feb 2000

I read a story in the San Francisco paper a few days ago about how all these new dot-com millionaires in Silicon Valley are depressed because they've made so much money so quickly and they don't know what to do with it.  Well, the boys in Boiler Room don't have that problem.  They're gleefully getting rich quick and are astute enough to spend their money on things like Ferraris and big-screen TVs on which they can watch Wall Street while reciting the lines along with Michael Douglas.  I'm not sure if the folks behind Boiler Room intentionally referenced Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross because they wanted to make their characters seem self-aware or just to head off criticism that this film is basically a rip-off of those two movies.  It wants to be the Wall Street of the new decade, with the Gen-X (or Y -- who the hell knows any more?) edge of Fight Club.  But it's missing the brains and rhythm of David Mamet, the ambition of Oliver Stone, and, hell, anything from Fight Club except maybe the bags under Giovanni Ribisi's eyes, which look a lot like the bags under Edward Norton's eyes.  And it sure hasn't got anything like the acting talent or the wit in any of those movies.

Boiler Room's prime selling point is Ben Affleck, who wanders in and out for an extended, scenery-chomping cameo a la Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, as the high-octane recruiter for a shady brokerage house staffed entirely by white men in their early to mid-twenties.  These are not very nice men.  They swear a lot, and they say mean things about women and people of different ethnicities.  Their entire lives seem to be a game of "¿quien es más macho?", measuring their penises by way of expensive cars, big bankrolls, and gambling.  How thrilling this all is for those of us with, oh, I don't know -- a brain.  It's not even convincing enough to be offensive.

Giovanni Ribisi is actually not bad as the neophyte who's got a talent for scamming, and he almost made me care about him for a little while (but then he ruined it with an idiotic bit of over-acting in an insipid subplot about his character's relationship with his father).  Actually, the acting as a whole isn't too bad, but the actors really don't have much to work with.  And the movie really didn't suck as bad as I thought it would based on the first 20 minutes.  But that's not a recommendation.  This is just a mediocre movie; it's not even worth my effort to figure out exactly why it's not better.  And it's not worth your effort to see it, unless you happen to see it for free, as I did.


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