Middle Men - 2009
Director: George Gallo
Starring: Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi
OK, I TRY to not start a movie with expectations already
set. If they are, I try to cast them aside as best as I can. But…drama about
the start of internet porn…you just can’t…clear your mind of that. It’s like trying
to not set expectations for a McDonalds. Every cook is different, cashiers are
people too and can be nicer in some parts of the…no…no…it just feels dirty to not
instantly assume screaming and indigestion. So here comes Middle Men, with which all the trailers made you assume that it was
a sexual romp with plenty of nudity, tasteless jokes, and possibly a lesser
known Baldwin brother cameo appearance. Faaaaaaaantastic. Love you too, BackLOG.
Within the first five minutes, we see Jack Harris (Luke
Wilson) loading millions into a bag saying “I bet you’re wondering how I got to
the point where I’m driving this sack of money to Russian mobsters.” Because
that’s why people willingly turned on this movie. Nope, “boobies.” Let’s just…keep
thinking inside the DVD box here.
I will give this movie credit for doing an expert job of not
being so pointlessly gratuitous that I thought the full title was “National
Lampoon’s Middle Men.” In fact, it actually told a good story when it was
focused on its story, despite all the times I wanted to say “yeah, I’m sure
THAT happened.”
![]() |
Ribisi channels the Keanu Reeves's patented "uhhh...duhh..." face throughout the movie. |
Though internet porn is the catalyst here, the actual achievement
shown in the “based on a true story” Middle
Men is the creation of e-commerce as seen through Jack, who in the real
world is actually Richard Gordon (in case you wanted to look it up). Granted,
the movie cares about the e-commerce revolution about as much as THOSE
schoolgirls care about studying and its facts are (ummm…sex joke, sex joke, sex
joke…ummm) not very tight (nailed it), but that’s fine. We’re not here for a
history lesson.
The story goes, one day in some dingy apartment, two toked
up losers having an argument about masturbating together come up with the idea
to scan pictures from their dirty magazines and charge people to see them on
the internet. One of them happens to a programmer (a fact that…I can’t not
think is completely accurate for some horrible reason) and creates the code
that became the standard for accepting credit cards over the internet (not…COMPLETELY
untrue…). Having no clue how to run a business, their missteps get the attention
of…other losers who get the attention of Jack Harris…a financial fixer-upper of
sorts who, through some ingenuity of his own, turns this small time venture
into the multi-billion dollar industry that we all know and…don’t…love…when
nobody’s looking…
All things considered, I was rather impressed with this
movie…which shouldn’t have happened. A majority of the plot was around Jack
Harris’s attempts to turn this venture into a legitimate business despite being
surrounded by…pretty much the worst people ever. The movie did a really good
job with this and definitely made it har….difficult for Jack to get it off…the
ground. Damn it. I was expecting a lot of horrible excuses to put nudity in the
picture but there were times where I almost couldn’t help but think they were
trying to figure out how to keep it out. It’s as if the filmmakers actually
were interested in the story they were telling…and despite how ludicrous it
seemed as a “true story,” as a story it was actually not a half bad watch.
![]() |
Incredible shots like this happened often. I was very impressed by the cinematography. It's like they cared. |
The cast wasn’t half bad either,
because Giovanni Ribisi, who played one of the toked up losers, actually makes
a pretty good “creepy psycho” (see Perfect
Stranger). Along with James Caan, Kevin Pollak, Rade Serbedzija (Boris the
Bullet Dodger from Snatch if you don’t
know), and Kelsey Grammar (yes, really), everyone’s level of lunacy and poor
handling of something WAY over their heads actually made for an intriguing
group that wasn’t particularly great at being funny, dramatic, sad, or
obnoxious…but was just the right levels of everything for me to keep watching.
Would I recommend this movie to
everyone? Well…maybe not if you want to stay in your relationship. It’ll
probably be difficult to convince your girlfriend that wasn’t some softcore
porn movie but…it wasn’t. Actually, there are plenty of better movies that take
on the adult industry with seriousness and great drama (because I’ll get
arguments for saying 8MM I’ll stick
to a lesser known and absolutely incredible Indie film Mute Witness). I think the “based on a true story” part hurt this;
granted I haven’t fact checked (I can’t help but see that as a slippery slope),
there were a lot of parts of this film that were pretty damn ludicrous and
someone as intelligent as Jack Harris could have avoided a lot of things if he
just used that intelligence regularly (I mean, surely there was plenty of blood
in his brain).
Somehow, SOMEHOW leaping over the “Asian contortionist-low” limbo bar that I set for this movie, Middle Man snags a solid 7 out of 10 from me. Will I watch it again? …No, probably not. I can’t think of a single reason I’ll say “I’m in the mood for this…” but then again, I somehow got in the mood for John Q. a few days ago so…lord only knows.
No comments:
Post a Comment