Themes: Success is the Best Revenge, Ladder to the Top, Office Politics
Main Cast: Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni, Ethan Suplee
Release Year: 2002
Country: US
Run Time: 105 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG13
Plot
Hotshot marketing executive Andy Caspar (Adam Garcia) gives up his steady job to join a high-tech research and development center where he's teamed with three misfits, including socially-unacceptable Darrell (Jake Busey), to create a far-fetched and highly unlikely product -- a 99-dollar desktop computer. The company wants them to fail, but they succeed against all odds and come up with a PC that doesn't use a monitor or keyboard (it's holographic, and all of the memory is stored on an Internet server). A greedy competitor, Francis (Enrico Colantoni), sabotages their project and steals their idea as his own. Meanwhile, Andy's relationship with lovely neighbor Alisa (Rosario Dawson) hits the skids. Can Andy get the PC -- and the girl -- back? ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide
Review
Daringly contemporary and dryly amusing, this satiric take on post-Internet-bubble-busted high-tech corporations is bolstered by an engaging ensemble and a wry script co-written by Jon Favreau (Swingers), based on Po Bronson's prescient 1997 novel. It doesn't hurt that it was executive produced by he-should-know-comedy Harold Ramis and directed by Mick Jackson, who seems more comfortable on this human scale rather than with disaster epics like Volcano. Production values are good, if modest -- the hologram effects are fairly impressive -- but the bulk of the appeal is derived from the lovable cast, the roller-coaster story, and the up-to-the-minute pop-cultural references. Audiences turned off by gross-out comedies will appreciate the intelligence behind this geek fantasy. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide
Anjul Nigam; Gregory Jbara - Hank; Dan Butler - Lloyd; Linda Hart; Chandra West; Robert Patrick Benedict - Willy
Credit
Brad Ricker - Art Director, Bruce Crone - Supervising Art Director, Kym Bye - Associate Producer, Mindy Marin - Casting, Michele Imperato - Co-producer, Jill M. Ohanneson - Costume Designer, Aaron Barsky - First Assistant Director, Mick Jackson - Director, Don Brochu - Editor, Neil Machlis - Executive Producer, Harold Ramis - Executive Producer, Marco Beltrami - Composer (Music Score), Sharon Boyle - Musical Direction/Supervision, William Sandell - Production Designer, Ronald V. Garcia - Cinematographer, Trevor Albert - Producer, Robert Gould - Set Designer, Martin Roy Mervel - Set Designer, Anthony D. Parrillo - Set Designer, James Tanenbaum - Sound/Sound Designer, Alan E. Lorimer - Special Effects Supervisor, Cosmas Paul Bolger Jr. - Special Effects Supervisor, Jon Favreau - Screenwriter, Gary Tieche - Screenwriter, Liz Radley - Additional Cinematography, Jennifer Meislohn - Visual Effects Supervisor, Donald Sylvester - Supervising Sound Editor, Digital Filmworks - Visual Effects, DKP Effects - Visual Effects, Po Bronson - Book Author
The film was made by 20th Century Fox at the cost of $17 million and is sometimes shown on HBO. The video and DVD received limited release in New York and Los Angeles.
Po Bronson played a cameo role in the film as one of many tuba players living in the same building as the main character. The tenative title for this movie during test screenings was "The Big Idea".
Plot
Garcia stars as Andy Kasper, a man who gives up his cushy marketing job to do something more fulfilling. He gets himself hired at LaHonda Research Institute where Francis Benoit (Enrico Colantoni) assigns him to design the PC99, a PC to sell for $99. He moves into a run-down apartment building where he meets his lovely artist next-door neighbor Alisa (Rosario Dawson), and puts together a team of unassigned employees: Salman Fard (Anjul Nigam), a short, foreign man with an accent who is hacking into CIA files when Andy meets him; Curtis "Tiny" Russell (Ethan Suplee), an overweight, anthropophobic man; and Darrell (Jake Busey), a tall, blond, pierced, scary, germophobic, deep-voiced man with personal space issues who regularly refers to himself in the third person.
The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the $99 mark. It is Salman's idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector. The last few hundred dollars comes off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a "hypnotizer" code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they're done.
But immediately before he finishes, the whole team (except for Tiny, who is still writing the code) quits LaHonda after being told that there are no more funds for their project, but sign a non-exclusive patent waiver, meaning that LaHonda will share the patent rights to any technology they had developed up to that point. After leaving LaHonda, they pitch their product to numerous companies, but do not get accepted, mainly because
the prototype emagi (electronic magic) as it was now called, was ugly, and
something always seemed to go wrong during the demonstration of their product.
They have almost given up hope, when in comes the lovely next-door neighbor Alisa again, whose relationship with Andy has been growing steadily. She improves its look, and when called back by an executive from one of the companies they had pitched to, to whom they had said that their design teams were working on a cosmetic model that would be ready in a couple of days when she commented, "You haven't given much thought to the look of it." After meeting with her, they agree to give her 51% of their company in exchange for getting their product manufactured and for getting Andy's Porsche bought back, which he had had to sell in order to raise money to build a new emagi after leaving LaHonda. Unfortunately, she then sells the patent rights to the emagi to Francis Benoit, who plans to sell the emagi at $999 a piece and reap a huge profit. The team interrupts the meeting in which Benoit is going to introduce the emagi to the world and introduces an even newer computer he and his team developed and manufactured at LaHonda, which was in a state of disaster when they arrived. It was a small silver tube that projected a hologram and lasers which would detect where the hands were, eliminating the need even for virtual reality gloves. Also, Andy reminds Benoit of the non-exclusive patent waiver, which had even been Benoit's idea in the first place.
