Office Space

The creator of the long running “Beavis and Butthead” MTV cartoon branches out into live action with this farcical spoof of life in a modern, American office. While sure to elicit a few chuckles with anyone who’s ever worked in an office environment, it also takes the viewer on a trip laced with lots of profanity and immoral humor.

Peter Livingston is your average twenty-something computer programmer at computer company Initech. Surrounded by annoying coworkers, an idiotic boss, a boring, dead-end job he hates (his job is to correct the year format in accounting software from two to four years!), Peter is having a horrible Monday when out of the blue a suggestion planted in his head by a therapeutic hypnotist changes his work attitude from stressed to downright mellow and nonchalant. Pete goes from being a fairly model employee to being a total slacker who is content with doing nothing. He even has a hilarious interview with two outside business consultants looking to lay off extraneous people, saying that he basically comes in when he wants and maybe does about fifteen minutes of real work in a day. Peter and two coworkers also come up with a scam to steal fractions of a cent from each transaction with a credit union, though in the end they repent of doing so.

Though fairly entertaining, I hesitate to recommend this movie based on its moral content. “Office Space” could be construed as saying to viewers that not ever having to work is paradise, whereas the Scriptures tell us that work is one purpose for which we were created (though it is cursed by our sinful state). Though in the end of the film, this premise is somewhat ambiguously rejected. There is also premarital sex, tons of swearing, and a lot of sexual/adult humor. You could do worse than to rent this film, but you could also do better.