Waiting... (2005)
Directed by Rob McKittrick
Young employees at Shenaniganz restaurant collectively stave off boredom and adulthood with their antics.
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The Kevin Smith comedy "Clerks" is the obvious comparison, and "Waiting" has its Dante and Randal characters, played by Justin Long as sensitive Dean and Ryan Reynolds as wise-guy Monty.
Still, Waiting... is generally an agreeable piece of work in the vein of Kevin Smith's Clerks and it's ultimately clear that the film will fare best among viewers who work (or have worked) in a chain restaurant.
When Kevin Smith's classic slacker comedy "Clerks" debuted in 1994, it unleashed a tidal wave of copycat films, almost all of them made for nothing, and rarely seen.
The closing credits give a pointed "thank you" to Kevin Smith and his film "Clerks," which is fitting.
Writer-director Rob McKittrick�s agonizing debut attempts a Clerks-meets-Slackers comedy about the young and restless wait staff of an Applebee�s-style restaurant.
This foul-mouthed, slackers-on-the-job comedy dearly wants to be the 21st-century version of Kevin Smith's 1994 independent hit "Clerks."
Remember "Office Space," with Jennifer Aniston as a flair-wearing Chotchkie's waitress?
Give the makers of "Office Space" the bad news -- the residual checks may be getting smaller because "Waiting" is probably going to play on an endless loop at Comedy Central for the rest of our lives.
While the foibles of twentysomthings living off sarcasm and minimum wage isn't exactly fresh ground to work with, "Waiting" also takes aim at those omnipresent TGI Fridays-type of restaurants, and, "Office Space" notwithstanding, it still feels like a fresh target.
There's real potential in the premise of young, unmotivated screw-ups logging time at a dead-end restaurant joba hash-slinging Office Space, basicallybut first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick makes it look like a homemade sitcom laced with profanity.
But McKittrick's script, which never met a penis joke it didn't like, refuses to raise itself to the clever, subversive level that made the similarly-themed "Office Space" such a cult success.
Ryan Reynolds (the poor man's Seann William Scott) is our cheeseball host on a tour of Shenaniganz, a chain restaurant not unlike the one that was skewered more effectively in "Office Space."
Had Val Kilmer's character in Real Genius been played by a smirking pod person, he'd be a lot like Reynolds in Waiting..., a sophomoric hunk of raunch from American Pie producer Chris Moore, who has finally given frat boys their own Barbershop.
The restaurant setting as a form of humor is nothing new as we've seen a lot of this before in Mike Judge's far superior "Office Space" or even back in Judge Reinhold's bits in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."
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At last answering the eternal question if restaurant employees abuse returned food, shown here with an abundance of sickening visuals that give the "American Pie" films a run for their money, "Waiting" is never one to let a tasteless gag get past it.
Had Val Kilmer's character in Real Genius been played by a smirking pod person, he'd be a lot like Reynolds in Waiting..., a sophomoric hunk of raunch from American Pie producer Chris Moore, who has finally given frat boys their own Barbershop.
Recycling humor from "American Pie" and the Farrelly brothers' oeuvre to derivative excess, "Waiting" is a proud member of the rank and vile, a sex comedy for people who found "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" too philosophically arcane to comprehend.
The writing fears no boundaries and cheerfully stomps all over a sense of common decency, playing as a throwback to the riotous gross-out comedies of the 1990s, such as "There's Something About Mary."
But audiences looking for There's Something About Mary excess will be frustrated by the way McKittrick continually steps back just when things get truly nasty, almost like he's directing a network-TV movie with cable-TV dialog.