Here’s my review of “The Company Men” from KTKA-49.
We’re at least a good two years into the current economic recession—and the newly Oscar nominated documentary “Inside Job” does an incredible job of fleshing out the reasons for it and the people responsible.
But that’s not the movie I’m reviewing today. This week, “The Company Men,” starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper as recently laid-off upper-level management folks, hits theaters. This dull, dull, dull movie asks us all to sympathize with the corporate suit-and-tie guys who may not have been directly responsible for the crisis, but they certainly lived high off the hog before it all went down.
When Kevin Costner shows up as a noble blue-collar construction site foreman, you can pretty much figure out the humbling journey these men will take as they enter the ranks of the unemployed and have to sell their big homes and fancy cars.
Let me be clear, though. It’s not merely the premise of “The Company Men” that I object to, it’s that such acting talent is wasted in such a humorless, stereotypical, moralizing film.