September 24, 2004

How to Get Even With an Evil Boss

he monstrous title character of "Rick," a surreal morality tale that is based on Verdi's "Rigoletto" and suggests an especially heavy-handed episode of "The Twilight Zone," is a corporate snake so venomous that he makes the sadistic practical jokers in Neil LaBute's "In the Company of Men" seem like wimps. Narrowing his eyes into gleaming slits of contempt and curling his lips into a tight little sneer, Rick (Bill Pullman) toadies up to Duke (Aaron Stanford), his boyish, much younger boss at the Image Corporation, with the kind of preening jock talk that is coded bile.

Duke whiles away his afternoons exchanging lewd instant messages with the mysterious Vixxen. (His screen name is Bigboss.) As it's later revealed, Vixxen is none other than Rick's luscious college-age daughter, Eve (Agnes Bruckner).

One afternoon, Rick meets his nemesis, Michelle (Sandra Oh), a reserved young Asian-American who comes for a job interview. After gleefully humiliating Michelle by repeatedly forgetting her name and confusing her ethnicity, he rejects her simply because she isn't the blonde Duke demanded he hire.

But Michelle doesn't go away. That evening she reappears as his server in a fancy bar where he and Duke repair for after-work martinis. Once again he insults her. And when she refuses to serve him anymore, she is summarily fired, to Rick's crowing approval. In a parting shot, she lays a curse on Rick, calling him "an evil man with an evil soul."

We know Rick is destined for doom when empty taxis speed by him. The next morning he is visited by Buck (Dylan Baker), an old business-school acquaintance flashing a leer so slimy that you half-expect devil's horns to sprout from his forehead. For only $10,000, Buck proposes to kill Duke so that Rick can ascend. Buck has already wreaked havoc in the upper echelons of the pretentiously named Fagade Corporation.

In another ominous coincidence, Duke is seized by lust upon meeting Eve as she leaves a restaurant with Rick, who misleads his boss into thinking that she's his wife. You can bet that there's hell to pay at the film's climactic event, a grotesque Christmas blowout that Eve insists on attending and in which she watches her father, dressed as a mountaineer, cheer Duke's fatuous speech about climbing "the mountain of success."

The actors, especially Mr. Baker, relish their nasty roles in the film, directed by Curtiss Clayton from a screenplay by Daniel Handler, better known as the children's author Lemony Snicket. But late in the game, the movie's cynicism collapses into glop when Rick comes across some old LP's, including the Beatles' White Album and Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," and he remembers that he was once a nice person.

The belated sentimentality of the movie, which opens today at the Angelika in Manhattan, is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

"Rick" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for strong language and sexual situations.

RICK

Directed and edited by Curtiss Clayton; written by Daniel Handler, based on Verdi's ``Rigoletto''; director of photography, Lisa Rinzler; music by Ted Reichman; set decorator, Heather Loeffler; produced by Ruth Charny, Jim Czarnecki and Sofia Sondervan; released by ContentFilm. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 100 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Bill Pullman (Rick), Aaron Stanford (Duke), Agnes Brucker (Eve), Sandra Oh (Michelle) and Dylan Baker (Buck).