This is a dumb movie. This is the kind of movie that pisses me off - the writers either have no idea how life in the real world works, or they think average moviegoers are so stupid that they won't question anything. This is pretty much how I felt about every movie directed by Robert Luketic, most notably 21, the movie about MIT students taking down casinos by counting cards.
Where to start? Liam Hemsworth plays Adam Cassidy. Adam works for Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) who runs a successful cell phone technology corporation. At the start of the movie, Adam and his team are about to pitch some new idea / technology they've developed to Wyatt and his executive committee. The pitch doesn't go well, and in the next scene, Adam and his team have been fired. Why were they fired? The movie doesn't explain this. In most corporations, employees aren't fired for giving a bad pitch. They are just sent back to their desks. Was this a condition of their pitch? Were they gambling their careers over this? "You'll love this idea or you can fire us." Was that how they got the meeting scheduled?
Anyway, for whatever reason they have been fired. Adam consoles the team by using the corporate credit card (which no one at the company bothered to ask for back) to take them out for a night at an expensive bar. There is also a dumb scene where the doorman won't let Adam in, and the next night he does. Why does he let him in? Because he has this credit card? Why didn't he use the card the night before? I digress ... too much stupidity in this movie.
They run up a $16,000 bar tab, so Wyatt has his men grab Adam and threaten to have him arrested for this. Adam says he'll pay it back, but of course he can't, so Wyatt gives him an option. Go work for his competition Jock Goddart (Harrison Ford), steal their new prototype and bring it back, and he'll not only forgive the debt, he'll also pay him a million dollars.
Luckily the movie doesn't make us sit through a sequence where he has to think about it. Wyatt has him over a barrell, so he has to take the deal.
Next, Wyatt says he will put him through training to teach him how to be a corporate executive. That consists of ... giving him a suit and expensive apartment, and telling him to make contacts. That's it. Because the movie is hoping we won't think about this too much. Also, it's not clear how Wyatt gets him the job with Goddart. He is taken to a restaurant where he meets with Goddart's recruiter and another executive named Emma Jennings (Amber Heard), and they are excited to have him, and suddenly he's an executive.
Oh, and he knows Emma because the night they were partying, he ran into her at the bar. He went home with her and the next morning, she kicked him to the curb. She knew right away he was a 'bridge and tunnel' guy, meaning a lower class citizen then herself. Yet she doesn't bust him when he turns up at the lunch. This also isn't clear - does she know he's an imposter of some kind, or does she just think he suddenly climbed the corporate ladder really fast? Not explained. But if you've ever seen a movie before, you know that they will wind up together.
Anyway, what follows is typical corporate espionage stuff. There is some new cell phone technology that Wyatt wants Adam to steal - basically it's a phone that you can roll up into a ball or something. The movie tries to look cool, but no one involved in this movie even talked to anyone who knows anything about the corporate world or science. So any time they are talking about their technology, it's not about how it actually works on a technical level, just how it will look to the consumer.
Another part that bugged me - Wyatt's enforcer gives Adam a cell phone. He says if I call you, you answer immediately no matter what. Adam isn't smart enough to say "What if I'm standing right in front of Goddart? Won't that, you know, blow my cover?" At some point, the FBI gets involved. It seems they are already investigating Wyatt, and he's done this before. Adam's predecessors have all ended up dead. There are also security cameras all over his apartment and his dad's apartment. The movie really wants to be The Firm, but it doesn't have a tenth of that movie's intelligence.
In case you can't tell, this movie bugged me. I haven't even mentioned that Adam's dad is played by Richard Dreyfuss. There you go, I just did.
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