Free Great Movies Review

The 90s indie dark comedy Swimming with Sharks is a mostly unpleasant Hollywood satire about an assistant (Frank Whaley) to a studio executive named Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey). Anyone that has worked in Hollywood as assistant knows that it is an unpleasant experience and anyone that doesn't work in Hollywood probably doesn't care. Nevertheless writer/director George Huang felt the need to show Kevin Spacey yelling at Frank Whaley for 90 minutes probably to get out his real life frustrations from working as an assistant at a studio. The movie is at turns cynical and sentimental, as Kevin Spacey proves too nasty to provide much humor and Frank Whaley is too much of a lightweight to give the film much heart. It's a low budget Hollywood satire for people in the industry only, and nowhere near as funny or biting or ambitious as Robert Altman's The Player (1992). There's even an aspiring director in the film named Foster Kane, which isn't good writing by any stretch of the imagination.