George Gallo
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Gallo's self-consciously overstated direction feeds the impression that he's trying to remake Goodfellas...can we all agree by now that the use of 'Sympathy for the Devil' in crime pictures ought to be outlawed?
The verdict: A slickly packaged but dumbed down rip-off of superior work from Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson (most notably “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights”), the story and style choices in “Middle Men” seem more desperate than the actions of the characters on screen.
If Henry Hill of " Goodfellas " had left witness protection and gone straight into the Internet porn racket, " Middle Men " could have been the next movie made about him.
I suppose Gallo assumed he'd get nailed with the " Casino "/" Goodfellas " tag regardless and figured he get all his Marty-ya-yas out.
His story -- which is so loosely based on fact, as the multiply caveated disclaimer at the end of Middle Men indicates, that it might as well be fiction -- is kinda the reverse of GoodFellas : Ever since he was a kid, Harris never wanted to be a pornographer or to go in business with the Russian mob: it just sort of happened.
‘Middle Men” is what you’d get if you took the script from “Boogie Nights,” cut-and-pasted in some old articles from “Wired,” and then filmed it like the last half-hour of “Goodfellas.”
Boogie Nights (1997)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced Middle Men (2009)
Plot Themes Visuals
The verdict: A slickly packaged but dumbed down rip-off of superior work from Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson (most notably “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights”), the story and style choices in “Middle Men” seem more desperate than the actions of the characters on screen.
The porn, the cokeheads and the Russian mobsters are the elements that are supposed to make this Boogie Nights wannabe sexy.
Blanketed in a saturated palette of shadowy, dense colors, Middle Men tonally aims for, and somewhat achieves, a lurid mix between a juicy morality tale and Boogie Nights's fetish for nostalgia.
Just because George Gallo's "Middle Men" falls short of its appar ent goal to be the "Boogie Nights" of In ternet porn doesn't mean this loosely fact-inspired serio-comedy isn't far more entertaining than you'd expect from a film that was dumped into theaters with minimal promotion by Paramount.
‘Middle Men” is what you’d get if you took the script from “Boogie Nights,” cut-and-pasted in some old articles from “Wired,” and then filmed it like the last half-hour of “Goodfellas.”
“Middle Men” wants to be “Boogie Nights” for the Internet.
Eddie Griffin is a cliche pimp, working at about one-tenth the comic level of his “DysFunktional Family.”
Supporting roles in John Wick 2 and xXx: Return of Xander Cage have propped the talented actor to starring roles, although most of her early vehicles have sunk under her sharp-edge abilities (last year’s The Doorman was a snooze fest).
This is neither Freeman’s first heel turn (see, for example, Wanted) nor Rose’s first stint as action star (see The CW’s Batwoman, or XXX: Return of Xander Cage, or, yes, John Wick: Chapter 2), and so neither of them has anything to prove by playing antiheroes or kicking butt.
Once he realizes that going back is to no avail, he travels forward where he encounters some decent but brief laughs for the viewer, as well as Orlando Jones ("Evolution," "Double Take") playing a futuristic and holographic librarian with a funny riff on H.G. Wells and Andrew Lloyd Webber.