[yasr_overall_rating]
A day in the lives of two system admins named Dan and Randy as they annoy users, discuss office politics, and watch gophers at the coffee shop.
There was a time when movies like “American Pie,” “Scream,” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?” were filling up the billboards. These movies would not require much from the viewer and would in exchange deliver a fast food entertainment. Don´t get me wrong, I have watched and enjoyed most of them. The problem with “Admins” is that it tries very hard to achieve something only to fail without even being able to touch it.
The movie plot is very simple, Dan, an IT guy in his mid-’30s, gets called to work on his day off to fix a system malfunction in the company he works for. From there the characters follow a path of predictable reproductions of office cliches delivered by neophyte actors. There are a few exceptions, like Doug Henderson, playing Randy, one of Dan´s only office friends. But maybe we are just killing the messenger and it is the writers, both Eric Espejo and Korosh Karimi, to blame. For these lines of dialog, credibility is as far away as Nasa´s newest planet. “We live in a world of Firewalls and these Firewalls have to be protected.” Maybe the camera department´s choices are to blame that the movie looks very flat, overexposed and weirdly framed. Of what I´m sure, is that no matter how good the makeup for the film was, the color correction left everyone looking yellow. The movie is so low-budget that it takes the underground.
There is a certain level of quality that a film has to deliver, and I´m not talking about content quality but about technical quality. It doesn’t matter how the quality of the image is, actually. An average consumer would be satisfied with a lot of content that is not recorded on the latest technology, take “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) as an example. A found-footage movie, recorded in handheld style, that had one thing that the rest of the ´90s similar horror movies didn´t, a crystal clear sound and that made it into an instant classic. You need to have good ambient sound and clear lines of dialog in order for your audience to enjoy and understand your movie.
And going back to it, “Admins” is divided into small sketches, which are presented to us with their name over a black background. Autocorrect, Mannerism, Lusers are just some examples. One of the last chapters is called “Culmination” and it culminates into a big nothingness. The movie dilutes and struggles for an hour and twenty minutes to deliver some kind of story, but it feels more like sitting on a boat, without a sail, during a storm that you can’t really hear.
Now available on DVD
