Middle Men

George Gallo's film is about the men who solved the problem of taking payments online in the late nineties. The two played by Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht are gifted and uncontrolled; Jack Harris, played by Luke Wilson, is the orderly businessman who comes between them. The system they build makes credit card processing possible for sites selling adult content, and the money starts flowing. The Russian mafia enters the picture shortly afterwards. What makes it interesting is the reality behind it. One of the producers, Christopher Mallick, is the man the Jack Harris character is based on; by his own account roughly eighty per cent of the film is accurate and the audience is left to sort out the other twenty. The remaining characters are composites of people he knew. The narration openly imitates the Scorsese template: voiceover, rapid ascent, montages of money, collapse. That is at once the film's smoothest and its most familiar quality. Who it is for: viewers who like crime and money stories drawn from real events. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an original narrative, or who will object to the industry's view of women passing unexamined.