On this week's addition of "Movies You Have Probably Never Seen, But Should Watch" we have "Boiler Room". This was my first time seeing this movie and my initial reaction is that it is pretty good. I’ve heard of this movie before, and I just got the sudden urge to watch it while reading ‘Barbarians At the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco’ (great book so far).
The deciding factor to check this movie out was my urge to watch a movie that centered around business. I’ve seen ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and read the book about a thousand times and thoroughly enjoyed both versions; I've watched ‘Money Never Sleeps’ and admit that though it did not compare to the original, it’s a very underrated movie. Because I had no intention of re-watching one of those movies, I decided on ‘Boiler Room.’ Very fitting for the time it was released; it possessed a lot of 90’s hip-hop. Essentially, it was the watered-down more realistic version of ‘Wolf of Wall Street’. Although there were no naked orgies while selling stock, there were depictions of coke, copious amounts of alcohol, and they hinted at prostitutes at one point. The cast consisted of many above average actors, plus Ben Affleck. And that made it pretty damn good. Vin Diesel plays a semi-large role in the movie and does a pretty fine job, especially for his reputation of being a shitty, one-line actor. Ben Affleck did a good job as well when he was on screen. Not so sure why he didn’t have a bigger role in this movie, but hindsight’s 20/20 right?
The main character Seth Davis, played by Giovanni Ribisi (AKA creepy guy from Ted), was an underachieving college dropout who ran a sketchy (but successful) casino out of his house. Seth ends up landing a job at a brokerage firm to please his dad, and because he wanted a lot of money. Long story short Seth does not understand how they are able to make so much money of each sale. He investigates the brokerage firm and discovers that it is extremely dirty, and he ends up screwing a lot of people out of their money. You could probably guess the rest (it’s predictable) but I’m not going to spoil it for you. The story developed pretty well. My favorite scene in the movie is when Seth has a client on the phone and the client wants to buy stock (at this point in the movie Seth is a trainee, so he has to hand it off to a senior broker). All of the senior brokers race to the phone, pushing and shoving each other out of the way. Vin Diesel gets to the phone first and picks up the phone. He starts bullshitting the client and stuff like that. Everyone in the office is surrounding him and listening on speaker. It’s almost identical to the scene in the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ where they virtually did the same thing. That happened to be one of my favorite scenes from that movie, and now I know where it originated. If you like movies like ‘Wall Street’ or ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ you would love this. I’d rate it a 6.9/10.
