MIDDLE MEN Coincidentally, Middle Men is also the title of an unproduced screenplay written by Frankie Muniz.
LET'S SAY YOU actually get to make the movie about your life. You'd probably embellish a few points, too, and that's what Middle Men producer Christopher Mallick has done: Fucked a porn star? Sure! Tossed the corpse of a Russian gangster into the ocean? Put it in the script! Helped the FBI eradicate terrorists by way of an internet porn site? Actually, that last one is closer to reality than the bulk of Middle Men, which purportedly tells a true story but seems totally farfetched.
Verrrry loosely based on Mallick, Jack Harris (Luke Wilson, and yeah, I wouldn't have picked him to play me either) is a founder of an internet billing service in the '90s, which not only nets him millions but puts him in the center of the porn industry. Soon he's in over his head, separated from his family while Russian gangsters are after him for a piece of the action. Meanwhile, his idiot partners (Gabriel Macht and Giovanni Ribisi) dive headfirst into gigantic piles of blow. It's lazy movie mythmaking, where drugs and sex are used as plot devices to inject urgency into a story that otherwise has none. I mean, would you go see a movie based on the life of an internet billing provider otherwise?
105 min. | Rated R
Director: George Gallo
Writer: George Gallo and Andy Weiss
Producer: Christopher Mallick, William Sherak, Jason Shuman and Michael Weiss
Cast: Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, James Caan, Gabriel Macht, Terry Crews, Christopher McDonald, Laura Ramsey, Kelsey Grammer, Jacinda Barrett and Rade Serbedzija
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