Are you the sort of person who watched redundancy dramedy Up in the Air and thought "you know what, this film would be much better if there was more redundancy"? Well here's a film for you! The Company Men centres around three blokes (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper) who work for a Big Bad Company and find that in a recession nobody has job security, except for the Big Bad Boss of course. The Company Men is a portrait of the American dream, or rather what happens when you wake up from it.

Job loss, what a bummer, and you've got to feel sorry for people who get laid off and can't pay the bills and whatnot. The thing is, this movie makes it hard to feel sympathy for the characters in question. Bobby (Ben Affleck) has it all; great job, pretty nurse wife, Porsche, big barbecue. When he loses his job (that's not a spoiler) you feel for him, but only for a second because he continues to swan around in his Porsche, ignore his wife's financial realism and generally be a douche to everyone. Tommy Lee Jones' character Gene seems at first to be a good honest man, but he's quite literally sleeping with the enemy. It is only Chris Cooper's character Phil who elicits real feelings of empathy, with his whole life spent at one company, he is spat out and has to start again in his late 50s. It is Affleck, though, that the film largely follows. We see him go from "$120k with incentives" to working in construction, where an extra $200 in your pay packet makes a big difference, and you get to mess around with a nail gun. The problem is, you get the feeling throughout that Affleck thinks he's better than construction, better than blue-collar working man Kevin Costner, and that makes you kind of hate him. There's also a staggering lack of any real female input; the women are invariably cast as slightly daft wives, hard-nosed business bitches and frumpy secretaries. In 2011, a film entirely centred about macho business boo-hoos feels dated and lame.

This is not a bad movie. I's excellently shot and the lead actors give solid performances, but it feels like two films; the first half is a bleak critique on corporate greed, but the second half descends into mawkishness as Ben Affleck finds himself, learns to love his fellow man, and realises that getting your hands dirty isn't really all that bad. The ending reverses all that, though, and leaves you feeling betrayed, ultimately exposing the film itself as hollow. The message, overall, is that the dollar is still king, the rich don't care who they screw over, and the old boys' network is alive and kicking.

The Company Men will be released on 11th March, but you'd probably enjoy a re-watch of Up in the Air more. We always check-in like Clooney now.