Main cast: Ryan Phillippe (Milo Hoffman), Tim Robbins (Gary Winston), Rachael Leigh Cook (Lisa Calighan), and Claire Forlani (Alice Poulson)
Director: Peter Howitt

“If you kill people, in real life they die!”

The above asinine dialogue is a fair representative of the entire movie that is Antitrust: it starts out dull and degenerates into too-serious-for-its-own-good super dull. Ugh. If only all computer nerds look like Ryan Phillippe, but this movie fails to make the Microsoft antitrust matter any more interesting to the common person.

But it does make Bill Gates a raving lunatic though. A nice thought, but not one petty enough to keep me awake.

Milo Hoffman and his gang of computer whizzes are advocates of open and free software. In nerd jargon, that translates as “heroes”. But Milo is lured into the monopolizing capitalist company of Bill Gates, er Gary Winston. Milo enjoys the sexy perk that is Alice Poulson, not knowing that the dowdy female colleague Lisa is casting goo-goo eyes at him. But Milo soon discovers that oh no, Gary is controlling information and monopolizing where the money is! That is so uncool! If Gary launches his Synapse program, he will rule the world via information control! He must be stopped!

What happens next? The usual – chases. The pretty ho turns out to be evil, the dowdy girl turns out to be a pretty angel, the hero returns to his open software roots (does he keep his large salary during his brief stint with Gary, or does he give them all to charity?), and everyone celebrates the fact that it is a crime to make money off the Internet.

Okay, so maybe it isn’t fair to expect Antitrust to be a statement-making movie when all it wants is to maybe just be a mere thriller. But does it have to be this dull, predictable, and boring?