Movie Review:Office Space

Mike Judge's new movie "Office Space" is theoretically a comedy. But it's also a frontal assault on life in the hi-tech workplace. It's not a great movie, but a fun tale about a band of disaffected geeks who fight back against a lughead boss in soulless corporation.

"Office Space" is a joyous frontal assault on the modern workplace - especially the computer part of same -- from Mike Judge, the creator of the late, much lamented "Beavis & Butt-head" and "King of the Hill."

It's also yet another in a lengthening string of movies centered on nerd and geek life.

"Office Space" is nowhere near close to being a great movie, but strangely is no less fun for that. Anybody who has endured or survived work as a low-level functionary in a high-tech modern corporation ought to go see this movie, preferably accompanied by colleagues and fellow office dwellers.

Ron Livingston plays Peter, a programmer who works in a suffocating cubicle working on updating Y2K code for banks. His company is aptly named "Initech," and it's never precisely clear what it does. His friends Michael (David Herman) and Samir (Ajay Naidu) are equally miserable but more accepting.

Peter hates every single thing about his job, including his oily bosses, so much that he simply stops going, aided in this by the sudden collapse by heart attack of a hypno-therapist at the very moment he was instructing Peter to feel better about things.

As the therapist is carted off to the hospital, Peter is frozen in a state of well being. He realizes his true ambition, which is to do nothing much.

So he comes in when and if he feels like it. He ignores his bosses demands. He knocks down his cubicle so he can see the view outside. He throws fish entrails around the office, and otherwise screws up so brazenly and publicly that he is, of course immediately promoted by his savagely portrayed middle-management martinet boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole.)

Peter is snapped out of his reverie when his admittedly and self-described geek buddies (shamelessly stereotyped as socially awkward, angry and timid) get laid off. They collectively decide to seek revenge by writing a software program that siphons off pennies from bank customers in such small amounts that they're sure nobody will eever notice the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars over a couple of years.

The plan seems surprisingly plausible, as does the program written to make it happen.

Livingston is so genially low-key (as are the oddly disconnected appearances by his girl friend, "Friend's" Jennifer Alston, who is so clumsily inserted as to suggest she filmed it at different times) that we pretty much stop caring what happens to him (since he doesn't why should we?).

The movie's great creation is the mumbling, resentful, aging nerd Milton, played by Stephen Root ("Newsradio"). Milton has accumulated a lifetime of grievances, from seeing his favorite stapler switched, to having his cubicle repeatedly moved, to having been laid off years earlier but never told. When Peter asks him to turn his radio down, Milton mumbles that he won't, because he has the right to keep his radio on from 9 to ll a.m. Cowed but hostile, Milton manages even to get screwed out of his piece of cake at an office party. But he never stops keeping score, and we never doubt he'll get even.

"Office Space" has some wickedly savage depictions of how work sometimes sucks in the age of the hi-tech company. For people at the bottom rung of giant corporations, work is temporal, boring and low-paying.

The young especially are moved around, alienated and exploited at will. For all that "Office Space" is a comedy, Judge doesn't seem to be kidding about his dead-on workplace depictions.

In "Office Space," layers of bosses fuss about memos and procedures, and the inevitable team of management consultants show up to wantonly toss people out the window.

That the consultants (known as the two "Bobs") instinctively read Peter's disenchantment, arrogance and defiance as obvious signs of a worker destined for higher management is one of the neater twists of the movie. "Office Space" is the first live-action feature directed by the creator of "Beavis and Butt-head" and "King of the Hill." An expansion of three animated shorts created by Judge for TV over the past decade, it has a wandering, disjointed feel to it. It doesn't really hang together as a movie, but more as a satisfying collection of biting work depictions.

These portrayals are almost disturbingly credible. Anybody who works for somebody else will find something in it to relate to and laugh about. But you can't see "Office Space" without wishing that the weirdly geeky Milton gets a series or movie all of his own next time around.

Mail-to: jonkatz@slashdot.org

Comments

Siphoning Money has already been done

[Mithrandir]

Down under here, a couple of years ago, some guys got done for exactly this. IIRC it was the Commonwealth Bank (Which Bank?). Basically all they did was to siphon the partial cents from each interest calculation of every account into their own separate account. Doesn't sound like much, but when you work out that every day there are a couple of million accounts that their doing this to, it suddenly adds up to very large sums of spare cash.