The battlefield here is a Super Club store, a cavernous warehouse where goods are sold in bulk (hair gel by the tub, condoms in lifetime supply). The adversaries are two rivals, slacker Zack (Dane Cook) and ambitious brown-noser Vince (Dax Shepard), both vying for the coveted "employee of the month" title.

Vince has a definite advantage here. As defending champion, he has held the title 17 months running. One more, and he lands in the Super Club hall of fame, putting him on the fast track to management and earning him a "brand-newish" Chevy Malibu.

If this were any other month, Zack wouldn't even bother to compete. But November is different. Nov. 1 brings a bodacious new cashier, Amy Renfro (Jessica Simpson), whose personnel file reveals she has a history of sleeping with "Employees of the Month." The way Zack figures it, win the title and he can win the girl (in the category of woefully underwritten women, Simpson's trophy blond takes the prize).

No doubt most Americans can relate to working a Super Club-style job at one point or other in their career, and slackers in particular will find an ally in writer-director Greg Coolidge, whose approach to punch-clock life favors those who maintain a certain ironic detachment toward their work.

God forbid you should enjoy your job, as Vince and his box-boy wingman Jorge (Napoleon Dynamite sidekick Efren Ramirez) seem to do. The trick is to get by doing as little as possible, and Zack and his colleagues (Harland Williams, Brian George and Andy Dick) have made a fine art of finding shortcuts: bribing their co-workers with candy bars, staking out an empty space between pallets as a makeshift lounge.

Coolidge knows he's not making Death of a Salesman here (he names the store managers Glen Gary and Glen Ross in tribute to David Mamet's elegy to the American Dream), but he's got the same eye for detail that made Office Space great. What he lacks is Arthur Miller's (or even Mike Judge's) sense for character.

We never love Zack or hate Vince enough to care about the outcome, and Amy is one-dimensional enough that a blow-up doll could've taken Simpson's place. Ultimately, the race is decided on a technicality (someone's been shoplifting), but we've seen employees stealing from the store all along: the "open-box policy," the "broken" candy bars, Zack's in-store date. Then again, if life were fair, no one would be stuck working at Super Club in the first place.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]