| Home | Movies A-M | Movies N-Z | News |
Poster art from impawards.com.
In Mike Judge's (TV's Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill) funny but flawed Office Space, Ron Livingston plays Peter Gibbons, a drone worker who is working the Y2K bug at a company called Initech. He's about fed up about it, and so are co-workers Samir (Ajay Naidu) and Michael Bolton (David Herman), and yes, that is his real name. Peter decides that he isn't going to quit work, he just isn't going to go. He strikes up a relationship with waitress Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), who is the second person billed and yet has about four scenes in the movie.
In short, Office Space is funny. However, its characters leave something to be desired. There were too many secondary people to really have us understand who they were. If they had had another part of the series (or something, like a TV show), then it would have been a lot easier to know everyone. The main characters had a droll humor that was likeable.
The script, though not packed with crude bodily function jokes, was funny and was masterfully written. It makes you forget about something and as soon as you do, it comes back to play (Milton, for instance). The script, on the other hand, had almost no plot. The first half was very funny as we see the lives of a Dilbert who hates his job. The second half gets into this whole crime speil about getting fractions of a penny. It would have been more fun if they had either taken that whole part out and made it more of a "sketch" type movie or gone with the crime part the whole way.
In a hilarious side-part, Stephen Root plays Milton, a dull roundish man who always gets "left out", so to speak. But don't take his stapler. He proves important at the end of the movie, even if he doesn't seem like he would be. Judge took this whole Office Space idea from his SNL skits about Milton and a 1991 short also entitled Office Space.
Office Space is a funny fable of cubicle-gone-wrong that does have some errors, but you can probably look over them.
Rated R for language.
Review Date: November 9, 2002