There aren't many actors who could be counted on to engender sympathy for a character who gets filthy rich by facilitating adult websites, leaves his wife for a 23-year-old sex star and is probably guilty, in at least a strictly legal sense, of distributing child pornography. One who can is Luke Wilson. He's made a specialty of what might be termed "Andy Travis" roles, after the eminently reasonable station manager forced to deal with ubiquitous goofballs on "WKRP in Cincinnati."
In "Middle Men," he's Jack Harris, an entrepreneur who helped to pioneer the anonymous credit card processing that enabled online smut peddlers to thrive. In the process, this buttoned-down family man from Houston ends up mingling with coke-addled programmers (Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht), a crooked lawyer (James Caan), the aforementioned Audrey Dawns (Laura Ramsey) and, naturally, a murderous Russian mobster (Rade Serbedzija).
It's an amusing tour of the days when the World Wide Web was more like the Wild West, and its many colorful characters are sharply drawn. Eventually, though, "Middle Men" succumbs to the limitations of its perspective. Harris' story is (loosely, one senses) based on that of Christopher Mallick, one of the film's producers, and it seems as if all the rough edges of the character have been sanded away. What could have been a complex portrait of a flawed man dealing with the perils of success ends up far less interesting.
(105 minutes, rated R, Living Room Theatres) Grade: C+