ViewGuide

Created Oct 16, 2009 08:46PM PST • Edited May 28, 2023 11:07PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Beavis goes to the office in Mike Judge’s cult classic Work Sucks comedy. OK, Judge’s infamous adolescent cartoonoid doesn’t actually appear. (Ah, yeah, it’s live action.) Similar infantilism is at play however in the apparent adults who populate the movie’s dispiriting workforce. Workers and management alike obsess over irrelevant trivialities, making this a case study of organizational dysfunction as much as a comedy.

   It is fairly funny, though it starts to drag well before its full hour and a half running time terminates.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Perfectly acceptable performances across the large cast. Only one is inimitable however: Stephen Root’s sniveling Milton. “Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler…” The Male Stars get four beams mostly because of him.

   “Ah. Yeah.” Gary Cole’s asshole VP performance: “Great” also.

   Diedrich Bader’s workingman neighbor was pretty cool too. Why isn’t Bader a big star? Hell, what’s Jennifer Aniston got that he doesn’t? Great legs aside.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Mike Judge satires “empty & meaningless lives” by creating apparent paeans to them. Think Beavis & Butthead. Here he’s crafted a proto-Marxist industrial park, wherein the purpose of work gets completely obfuscated, giving the worker bees adequate reason to rebel.

    Sadly the movie loses steam when they do rebel, becoming more of a Keystone Cops farce than the clever satire of the opening reels.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

    Plenty of catch phrases, most of which aren’t even about staplers.

    Judge cleverly has his hero adopt an existentialist outlook as a result of hypnosis interruptus. Cool.

    Also worth complementing is the pitch-perfect way the management fucks always articulate in the positive even when they’re really saying something negative. “Ah, yeah, great.”

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.6

    Set entirely in Edge City, the movie itself has almost no edginess. These characters are Born to be Mild.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

    Are those Jennifer Aniston’s feet facing the ceiling?

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Salty 2.3

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

    I’ve worked in more than a few software companies. While several had their share of absurdities, none approached Office Space’s Initech, a perfectly dysfunctional company where perseverance about cover sheets and staplers passes for productivity.

    Here no work gets done. Real work, that is. The kind of work that needs to get done in the real world.

    Here the management is so bad it makes Michael Scott from The Office look respectable. When a restructuring is necessary, they don’t lead from the top with a team focused organizational design. Oh no. They go the lame executive route, asking individual contributors what they do to determine how they might fit into the whole. This is inventorying the trees while being clueless about the forest.

    Real leaders of successful organizations instead design a results matrix and put people into positions of true ownership. It’s not clear whether the worker bees of Initech would be able to thrive in a functional organization, but the management they work under serves as a perfect case study of Anti-World-Class. IOW, you wanna know what World Class is? The opposite of this.

    Finally, though made in 1999, the movie seems from another era, before the web changed everything.

22. Circumstantial Glib 2.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0