Rod Stewart’s old tune The First Cut is the Deepest ran through my mind when I took a break in the middle of watching The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest this morning, which shows how odd our minds work since I don’t think I’ve heard the song since it was a minor hit back in the late ’70s. But it does sort of fit in with the movie, so fair enough.
The First $20 Million is based on a hilarious novel by Po Bronson, has a pretty decent director in Mick Jackson (Steve Martin’s LA Story and the original, BBC TV version of Traffic), and a good screenwriter in Jon Favreau (Swingers). So why the film never got a theatrical release and went direct to DVD/cable is something I don’t understand, though perhaps Norm Schrager’s review on FilmCritic.com is a clue to studio executive thinking on the matter.
Schrage doesn’t seem to have read the book and, while reading his review, I thought that was possibly a problem for him. But films have to stand on their own and by the time this one came out, the boom Dot Com times it depicts had ended, probably souring the tastes of most for a humorous look at the good times. I seem to have an odd ability to ignore such things.
So I laughed quite heartily at the adventures of Andy Casper and cohorts. I thought Favreau and Jackson did a good job of picking the right 100 minutes from the novel on which to focus the film. The meat of the story is an adventure in creating a small company in a garage and they wisely ran quickly through the lead up to get us there. Good comedies usually benefit from a non-comic subplot that provides breaks in the storyline and, while it was done better in the novel, the romance is a good layoff and also contributes to the denouement.
Adam Garcia really does the lead character of Andy Casper–I know a bunch of guys who wish they were just like him from tech company marketing departments, trust me. The other three PC99 team members are a bit more stereotyped, though Jake Busey actually is just right for his demented engineer role as opposed to usually just being a jerk. Rosario Dawson is sweet as the sculptor and Garcia’s love interest while Chandra West (familiar from NYPD Blue where she’s Mark Paul Gosselar’s current love interest Dr. Devlin) is the beautiful bitch with a terrific blow off line about her tits.
Recommended
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