Antitrust (UK)

This is the kind of film that requires you to adopt a particularly forgiving attitude in order to derive any real enjoyment. In my case, It caught me on a good day and although it`s quite far-fetched (and arguably mis-cast), I did find it quite diverting.

That`s not to say that it`s a great film (passable is the best description), but it`s certainly an evenings-worth of entertainment however you splice it. I don`t really care for the "teen" performances and melodramatic overtones, but the story is certainly solid enough and Tim Robbins is highly effective in his role. The plot stretches plausibility to breaking point on several occasions, but it makes enough sense in the end for you to forgive most of the earlier lapses.

It`s not an excessively original idea though and I immediately noticed the startling resemblance it has to another recent film. If you`ve seen "The Skulls", but you haven`t watched this yet, you may aswell save yourself the bother!. Antitrust is almost exactly the same as that movie, except it features a multi-national corporation as the villain instead of a secret society. The themes, tone and story arc are incredibly similar throughout and anybody that didn`t like Skulls should avoid this like the plague (a big vice versa if you did though!).

The disc itself is MORE than adequate and it screams "value for money". Some would call that over-praise for what looks like a merely mediocre selection (on paper at least). Fact is though, the extras are all high-quality efforts and there aren`t any "fillers" or puff-promotional pieces. What you do get is deleted scenes (particularly interesting ones aswell) which were cut after screen-tests and not necessarily because they were poor (they`re uniformally good in actual fact). The accompanying commentary for these scenes and for
the main feature shed some real light on why they were excised (the director on these commentaries is Peter Howitt who played Joey in "Bread" no-less!).

There`s a good 23min feature and a music video too, so the emphasis is on worthwhile material and not pointless space-wasting stuff. Needless to say with such a new title, the A/V quality is more or less faultless.

Basically then, a competent movie that has decent additional content. Not everyone will be as lenient as I chose to be and the film is admittedly far from perfect. That doesn`t mean you won`t enjoy it while it`s playing though and if you can de-activate your overly cynical-eyes for a few hours, then Antitrust may well have something to offer.

BTW- I wanted to give this a 7.5 for content, but .5`s aren`t accepted. In the end I went for a 7 because an 8 would be a bit too complimentary (but 7.5 is my "proper" grade!).