Ben Affleck may have found his most unlikable role ever, as the smug, well-paid employee of a shipbuilding corporation who brags about his golf scores to his co-workers right before learning he's been let go due to downsizing. If he was immediately humbled and open to suggestions from his wife about what his next step should be, the movie would probably lose some of its tension, but luckily he continues to golf, drive his Porsche and live in a huge-ass house until all of his severance package is pretty much gone and they have to move in with his parents. It's only then that he stoops to doing carpentry with his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), despite the fact that he passed up several surely more high-paying corporate jobs out of sheer arrogance and idiocy. Mind you, this is after he told his bro that "he doesn't see himself driving nails," which justifiably prompted his bro to call him a dick. He is such a dick.

We get other stories, as well. Chris Cooper is an older salesman who has an alcoholic wife and two college tuitions to pay, so he takes his firing even worse than Affleck does. (Although why a former welder went into sales rather than supervising the production of ships is a mystery.) His performance is the real standout of the movie, more so than Tommy Lee Jones as both men's boss, who clashes with his friend and CEO (Craig T. Nelson) over unnecessary downsizing and expenditures before getting the axe himself. But Jones' character is a multi-millionaire, and he's also sleeping with the head of HR, played by Maria Bello, so it's hard to feel too sorry for him. For his part, Nelson plays his most villainous role since Turner & Hooch as the company founder, who is more concerned about how the company looks on paper and how big his new office will be than what's going to happen to several thousand employees. If he'd also shot a dog, I wouldn't have been surprised.

There are plenty of clichés to go around: the movie starts and ends with the sound of news reports about bailouts and economic troubles, which seems unnecessary, and done to death. We meet a lot of people looking for jobs, and the movie hammers home the economic disparities between executives and... well, lower-level executives (we don't really meet any blue-collar workers, besides unaffiliated contractor Costner). And the rich do indeed appear to get richer even as the poor (well, the less rich) get poorer, which is so clichéd it hurts. Ditto the film's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" ending, which seems like a terrible idea on a lot of levels.

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