Review of The Good Guy (2009) by Steph O — 14 Feb 2011

The cast The Good Guy has is filled with some of my favorite television stars, Alexis Bledel is a favorite of mine from her Gilmore Girls days, Scott Porter is a Friday Night Lights MVP and Bryan Greenberg is currently being great in HBO's How to Make it in America. The film, though, has a so-so plot and not really much to offer other than these three great young thespians.

I like it however that the film offers a completely different, if not entirely unbelievable look at Wall Street, telling us there are some guys who work there who live to party with the money they make from trading stocks. This is a film that doesn't look at the Wall Street business like any other film we've seen does, not once do they refer to any knowledge about the trade, they just refer to the money they make and what they do with it.

Scott Porter plays one of the biggest up-and-coming guys in the business, he's a guy that's good at what he does, and what he does also includes going into bars to pick up the best girls in town and play silly teenage drinking games and just having a good time. Greenberg plays the new guy at the business, Daniel, he's the opposite, he's good at his job, probably not as good as Tommy, the Scott Porter character, but still very good, but he'd rather have a night at home eating something and then reading something before going to bed than partying.

Tommy then gets promoted as the head of it all and on a hunch that takes everyone else by surprise, because apparently you have to party to be a good trader, promotes Daniel and has to train him at the job. And then we find out that Tommy has a girlfriend, Beth, who's the Alexis Bledel character, Daniel notices that Tommy is feeding bullshit to Beth, who's really more his type than Daniel's anyways. She likes to read, you see.

You know the type of film this one is then, a dumb-ish romantic comedy with this Wall Street background, which I found new and quite refreshing really, and the writer-director DePietro is a former trader so this look at traders, though probably exaggerated, may be right to some extent, which would be awesome, really.

The characters are smartly written, they just don't have much to be that smart about I would say, but the protégé-becomes-rival-in-love situation is quite spectacular to see developed and it's always nice to see this people, especially Bledel, make a big-screen appearance.

Grade: C+.