Heard of that one before? True, it is not that orginal. What makes it a bit different from better movies in this genre, the likes of "In the Company of Men", or "The Player", is the background of the global discontent with globalization. The day these 7 candidates sat down for a dog-eat-dog, "Survivor"-style corporate job interview, just "happened" to be the day of demonstration against the devasation that IMF and World Bank visited on developing nations.
The "coincidence" is deliberatly planned and carefully crafted by the screen-writer. First of all, looming in the reception room is the invisible ghost of the "Gronholm Method", a fictional corporate screening methodology based in military psychology from the last century, adopted by the Big Bad Wolf of Corporate America, and then passed on to the Europeans and South Americans; a "globalization" of wickedness, if you will. It is also significant, for instance, that the first candidate to go is a wistle- blower with solid track record of untarnished conscience. This is then followed by a lily-livered public betrayal. Then the movie gravitates towards the final scene, the ultimate Mephisto Moment, when the souls are placed on the edge of a dainty scale of the Usurers of the 21st Century. On that note,can you extract a pound of human flesh, without one drop of blood? Yes, if the heart has no blood left in or around it.
There are also clear signs of nostalgia (of which I have mized feelings), preferring the known evil from the by-gone days to the incomprehensible coldness of heart in the younger generations of corporate warriors. The old-fashioned "Iberian Macho", while not a particularly savory character, is proven to be far less lethal and unconcionable than the multilingual, fashionably and carelessly vicious Gen-X'ers. One cannot help feeling for his panicked dislocation.
Chilling.
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