Corporate horror, not to be confused with… well you know. Belko is an enormous soulless industrialized people-storage and application unit, what we refer to colloquially as a human resource company in Columbia. Looks great, you can’t pay me enough. It’s basically a penal colony with snack machines. You know the kinda place I’m talking about, their chief product is “spreadsheets.” Everyone there has a favorite character in “Office Space.” There’s a “Pam” in every department. Sorry if this describes your situation… as in I’m sorry you live like this, not as in I’m sorry to offend you. Consider this tough love. Now go to trade school!
Ten minutes in (the whole flick is less than 90 minutes, this isn’t Citizen Kane, so let’s get things moving!) everyone is told over the loudspeaker “Hey everyone go ahead and kill two people” and I’m thinking “Oh I’ve got six picked out already, just give me a medium-sized rock and it’s on!”
Now before the shut-down, all the Columbian nationals were sent home, just leaving the 80 Americans in the building… a building tasked with the purpose of staffing Americans into all sorts of big Corporate establishments throughout South America. I can already see where this is going. Big morality statement, I get it. Either way, the building is sealed off with space alien “I’ve never seen material like this before!” metal, the whole placed is rigged up Big Brother style and everyone is chipped with explodey bombs in their heads therefor I guess we gotta do what Loudspeaker Jesus tells us to do. Soooo I’m gonna go ahead and pick this rock back up.
John McGinley is in this one, he plays a creepy weird guy with a sleazy smile. Perfect. Michael Rooker too, he plays a blue-collared hard-boiled no-nonsense action bully. Check. Oh and John Gallagher Jr, he’s the messy-haired Millennial love interest that feels he’s smarter than everyone else in the room. Spot-on. So they cast the roles right, it appears they put more than 20-minutes’ thought into the pre-production. Awesome, let’s hope it’s not an ill-advised career-ender.
So it all begins with the “Nah this is all phony let’s just smoke weed and wait it out” stage, then some head-splodey happens and everyone starts yelling at each other for a bit, because research shows that out-shouting everyone in the room solves most issues. After that throat-hoarsening waste of time everyone starts splitting into groups of good-guys and bad-guys. Battle Royale style. Lord of the Flies style. U.S. party-politics style. Then they find a way into the gun locker (every corporate office has one) and it’s all over. Just like in real life, once someone gets a gun in their hands the first thought is “Hm I wonder how cool it would be to murder some humans with this” but in LordOfTheFlysburgh everyone has zero morals so bangbangbangbang, ever’body dead.
Everyone you think is going to be an asshole does in fact become an asshole. Half the guys you think will do the right thing will probably also side with the assholes, and no one in the place will think “I don’t think anyone will mind if I just take off my tie now.” I dunno ’bout you, but when Office’geddon happens you’d better believe that tie is coming off. “We’re all going to kill and die by dinner break, so I’m just gonna go ahead and unbutton this top button.”
Good movie. Real feel-good ending. Bring a date.