This film is pointless, for many reasons. Not the least of which is that it's a bad bastardization of Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'Amuse (and Verdi's Rigoletto).
It gets off to an intriguing start, though. Meet Rick (Bill Pullman) the office jerk. He's a fairly unlikable guy, but that's because his wife was killed. Rick is also pushed around by his less-talented, half-his-age boss. So an old schoolmate says for $10,000 he'll kill any one person of his choosing. What do you do?
If you're Rick, you let yourself get pushed into something you don't want to do, and you make racial slurs on not one but two occasions to Sandra Oh, keep her from getting a new job and get her fired from her old one. So it's kind of hard to root for old Rick.
This film seems to want to tell us something, some truth about the human condition, but what? That all receptionists are mean? That all bosses are evil? That they always have clichéd, drunkard wives? That you can never get over the loss of a loved one? That grieving people are easily manipulated? That it's okay to be racist against Asians? That there are no good people, anywhere, ever?
In the end, it's a waste of the acting talents of Bill Pullman, Agnes Bruckner, Sandra Oh, and Dylan Baker.
It gets off to an intriguing start, though. Meet Rick (Bill Pullman) the office jerk. He's a fairly unlikable guy, but that's because his wife was killed. Rick is also pushed around by his less-talented, half-his-age boss. So an old schoolmate says for $10,000 he'll kill any one person of his choosing. What do you do?
If you're Rick, you let yourself get pushed into something you don't want to do, and you make racial slurs on not one but two occasions to Sandra Oh, keep her from getting a new job and get her fired from her old one. So it's kind of hard to root for old Rick.
This film seems to want to tell us something, some truth about the human condition, but what? That all receptionists are mean? That all bosses are evil? That they always have clichéd, drunkard wives? That you can never get over the loss of a loved one? That grieving people are easily manipulated? That it's okay to be racist against Asians? That there are no good people, anywhere, ever?
In the end, it's a waste of the acting talents of Bill Pullman, Agnes Bruckner, Sandra Oh, and Dylan Baker.