2000 - BOILER ROOM, is Wall Street light

A fairly decent rehash of Oliver Stone's Wall Street with some plot points borrowed from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.  This is the usual "money corrupts" story line as a clever young stockbroker cheats and swindles his way to making a fortune.  Come to think of it this is also the plot of The Wolf of Wall Street although Boiler Room came first.

Giovanni Ribisi is the up and coming stock broker working for a firm which is in reality just a place to screw clients over by selling them worthless "penny stocks."  At first he is okay with this operation but gradually his conscience begins to get the better of him and he eventually becomes an informer for the FBI in order to bring the company down.

 

The film has a few interesting characters of note, Vin Diesel is a sort of crooked stock broker with a sort of guilty conscience. Ben Affleck shows up occasionally channeling the Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross.  Ron Rifkin is Ribisi's Federal Judge father who gets dragged into his son's schemes. Of course because there has to be a woman in a story like this, Nia Long is the office secretary who becomes involved with Ribisi and adds absolutely nothing to this story.

For all the plagiarizing from other films Boiler Room is fairly entertaining mainly due to the performances of Giovanni Ribisi and Ron Rifkin.  I'm not sure why Ben Affleck is in this film?  His over the top performance contributes nothing to the story, it's just a silly show off role which is in the film for no particular reason but gives Affleck a chance to mug his way through his few scenes.

The film was written by Ben Younger.  The running time is 120 minutes.