The main character is played by Luke Wilson. Jack Harris is a family man. He and his wife are a cute all-American couple living in Texas. Soon a friend in L.A. needs help solving some business problems (I was never sure really what Jack's profession was) as Jack is known to be a good problem solver. He gets his friend's business back in line and is asked to solve more problems, eventually by oily lawyer Jerry Haggerty (James Caan). Haggerty's clients, Wayne and Buck (Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht) are borderline idiots (although the film shows us that Buck was once a rocket scientist waylaid by drug abuse), but have come up with an idea to use the then-fledgling internet as a sales portal, to sell porn. Buck, the mathematically inclined one, writes a program that will receive credit cards for payment (a new concept) and online shopping is born. There are humorous moments as we see the guys gleeful over making money for so little input, so they get greedy and decide to offer new content by filming dancers at a club belonging to a Russian mobster Nikita (Rade Serbedzija). But the two yokels are often high and forget to send Nikita his share of the profits, and so that is why Haggerty has called Jack in to help.
Jack does kind of help them, and even becomes their business partner, but there is a deadly mishap. Jack also is away from home too much solving everyone else's problems, eventually tempted by a porn star (Laura Ramsey), and so he and his wife separate. The porn situation escalates until the FBI (Kevin Pollock) is investigating them all.
The film ends as it shows us what Jack attempts to do to solve everyone's problems. It suffers from Luke Wilson, the lead actor, being the least interesting actor and character as he is often the straight man in the situations and doesn't offer much of a personality. He often gets upstaged by Giovanni Ribisi. Most of the other characters are more interesting than Jack, they have some humorous characteristic or criminality that make them funny and for some maybe stretching their wings as actors, whereas Wilson's acting job doesn't bring much that distinguishes him as the lead. Add to that the constant reminder of what a family man he is, but when you look at all the crimes and immoral behavior he has acted upon, I think the audience forgets that by the end of the film so ultimately won't sympathize with him.
The film also shows how Jack manages to get out of any scrape, even though he does suffer in between, and also how moronic other people are, making stupid mistakes due to their greed. The story moves along and is not boring, but it doesn't get deep down into Jack's character enough. Although the publicity for this film may be saying this his character invented internet porn or online billing systems, according to this film he really did neither, but he did advance it to a manageable and lucrative business.
As for R vs PG (or PG 13), the film does have topless women, drug use and violence, but it felt tame to me and not button-pushing or titillating as you might think it would be. Jack's porn star girlfriend is never shown naked and the clips of her performing on the internet show her clothed in lingerie striking sexy poses. The film will probably draw viewers in with the sex theme but can only entertain them with what is ultimately a feel good story with some humor. I think a slightly better lead actor with a more in-depth take on the character would have helped more.
No comments:
Post a Comment