ANTITRUST ( 1/2)
Remarkably unimaginative and predictable cyberthriller. Running time, 120 minutes. Rating: PG-13 (violence). At Empire 25, Loews Orpheum, Chelsea Cinemas, others.
‘ANTITRUST” is an inferior factory product, cranked out with little care and less imagination, that seems all the dumber because it’s pretending to be smart and topical.
It’s a not-so-paranoid fantasy about a Bill Gates figure trying to take over the world.
But the film’s crippling flaws, including a drearily unappealing hero, a relentlessly derivative and obvious plot, and unforgivable cluelessness about computer software and the people who make it, are enough to make you feel sorry for Microsoft and its ruthless boss.
“Antitrust” is also an example of Hollywood faux-leftism at its most idiotic: Director Peter Howit and screenwriter Howard Franklin have no clue why monopolies are bad – unless they do regular violent criminal stuff like arrange burglaries and commit brutal murders.
Tim Robbins plays Gary Winston, the blue-jeans-wearing geek turned CEO of a software company called NURV, which stands for Never Underestimate Radical Vision. Ryan Philippe, the pretty-boy star of “Cruel Intentions,” is Milo, a brilliant computer whiz personally recruited by Winston to help create a technology that will integrate all the world’s TVs, cell phones and computers.
Milo relocates from Stanford, Calif., to Winston’s Portland, Ore., campus with his girlfriend, Alice (Claire Forlani), leaving behind his techie pals, who’d rather be part of a garage start-up, but gaining a spanking new apartment and car, just like that lawyer in “The Firm.”
Milo and Winston get on famously, until it occurs to Milo that there may be a connection between Winston’s uncanny ability to come up with amazing technical innovations and the violent deaths of independent programmers, like Milo’s old pal Teddy Chin (Yee Jee Tso).
Milo then starts sneaking around the campus, breaking into the company’s system and plotting with Claire and a cute co-worker (the doll-like Rachael Leigh Cooke) – neither of whom are who they seem to be – to expose NURV’s wrongdoing to the world. He also enlists the help of two indistinguishable pals from college.
Philippe’s believabilty as Milo is limited by an acting arsenal that relies on pouts, blank stares and fits of unconvincing shouting. It makes Robbins’ performance seem all the livelier, even though he mostly does Winston as a goofier version of the right-wing terrorist he played in “Arlington Road.” (There are moments, though, when he looks and sounds eerily like Bill Gates.)
One lame piece of dialogue follows another, as if the filmmakers assumed audiences could be fobbed off with lines that sound only vaguely like real human speech.
The script can’t seem to make up its mind about intellectual property rights: On the one hand, you’re supposed to hate Winston for stealing the ideas of young programmers; on the other, there’s a lot of rhetoric about how all knowledge should be shared for free. But in the end, it’s clear where the filmmakers stand from the shameless way in which “Antitrust” rips off other, better thrillers, like Hitchcock’s “Frenzy.”
Though deadly serious, “Antitrust” should provide some good laughs for anybody who knows anything at all about computers.