Review of Free Enterprise (1998) by Tom A — 15 Dec 2010

(NOTE: I apologize in advance to the USG).

It's hard for me to write about this movie without my words devolving from criticism to rage vomit, so I'm going to try to be as level-headed as possible. Here goes: FREE ENTERPRISE, despite all the praise heaped on it by geek culture at large, is a terrible, awful, no-good, very-bad film. Credit where credit is due, William Shatner is pretty funny and while I'm not fact-checking myself here, this was probably the beginning of Shatner's second career he's built out of taking the piss out of his own ego. Trouble is, he's done this bit better since, his Ben Folds collaboration HAS BEEN is sharper, funnier, and more heartfelt. What hurts the movie even more is that Captain James Tiberius Shatner's presence here feels shoehorned in, a subplot written in at the last minute when the filmmakers found out he'd actually participate in their pop-culture circle-jerk. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

FREE ENTERPRISE is about two guys, Robert and Mark (which, surprise, are also the names of the writers), who work in the film industry, Robert is an editor of sleazy Z-grade skin flicks who fancies himself to be more Eisenstein than Corman, Mark is a writer who is trying to get his Brady-bunch themed slasher script off the ground. Robert obsessively collects comics, toys, and LaserDiscs, yet can't pay his power bill and mooches off of his friends, which causes problems with the many women he somehow cons into dating him. He's also an enormous, insufferable asshole. Mark is also an enormous, insufferable asshole, but he's an asshole who can pay his bills and buy dinner. Both are also Gen-Xers who happen to be going through the crisis of turning thirty. By chance they befriend their childhood hero William Shatner (who inexplicably reads porn in the same section that carries MEIN KAMPF for the sake of lazy jokes) and he starts selling them on his idea for a musical version of JULIUS CAESAR where he will play all the roles (except the female ones). They lament the fact that he's nuts. Then stuff happens.

As you may have guessed by that (admittedly muddled) story run-down, there are lots and lots of plot threads running through this movie. Robert's relationships, Mark's movie projects, Shatner's musical, midlife crisis, etc. This movie is already way too long at two hours, and almost none of these plot threads are developed and they rarely get any follow-through. The film's story and characters drown and die in the cesspool of dialogue that these people spout off. Every line contains some sort of pop-culture reference, every comeback is smarmy, mean-spirited, and resembles the geek idea of wit. The dialogue is only such that would exist in a post-CLERKS, post-Tarantino version of the nineties, it's the worst elements of the writing of Kevin Smith and QT amped up as loud as it'll go. Every line of dialogue seems so calculated and thought out on the part of the writers that they only seem concerned with showing the audience how smart they are, they forget everything else. What's worse is I can't tell if these guys are self aware at all. The characters in this film are horrible, unpleasant people, they're the sort of condescending uber-geeks I tend to avoid, and the tone of the movie hints that the writers fall into this camp. The movie flirts with the idea of these characters growing up, becoming responsible, and shaking off the albatross of geekdom and placing it in the back seat, but in the end the movie seems to say none of it matters. These are characters that couldn't be geekier if they tried, and yet they have hard-bodied women practically throwing themselves at their feet amid a room full of action figures. I'm not knocking the idea of obsessively collecting, Lord knows I have no room to talk, as my bedroom doubles for a den of DVDs and Blu-rays, but that stuff doesn't exactly impress the sort of women Robert brings home, at least not in the real world.

I'm a geek and I don't pretend not to be. I obsess over movies and collect them like John Cusack in HIGH FIDELITY geeks out over vinyl records. But FREE ENTERPRISE is a movie about geeks who also happen to be petty, awful, unpleasant people who speak in a language that feels like Aaron Sorkin-style faux wit mixed with Kevin Smith and QT pop-culture obsession, it was an experience that hurt me physically to endure. There are constant rumors of a FREE ENTERPRISE 2, one thinks the money used on that production could be put to better use, like using it to fund terrorist cells or as a donation to help pay for Kim Jong-Il's next secret trip to Disney Land Japan.