In Good Company movie review & film summary (2005) | Roger Ebert

It doesn’t start out that way. We meet Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid), head of advertising sales at a sports magazine, who has the corner office and the big salary and is close to landing a big account from a dubious client (Philip Baker Hall). Then disaster strikes. The magazine is purchased by Teddy K (an unbilled Malcolm McDowell), a media conglomerator in the Murdoch mode, who takes sudden notice of a 26-year-old hotshot named Carter Duryea (Topher Grace) and sends him in to replace Dan. Carter takes Dan’s job and corner office, but instinctively keeps Dan as his “assistant,” perhaps sensing that someone in the department will have to know more than Carter knows.

Dan accepts the demotion. He needs his job to keep up the mortgage payments and support his family. But Carter, known as a “ninja assassin” for his firing practices, fires Morty (David Paymer), an old-timer at the magazine. As we learn more about Morty’s home life, we realize this only confirms the suspicions of his wife, who thinks he’s a loser.

Developments up to this point have followed the template of standard corporate ruthlessness, with lives made redundant by corporate theories that are essentially management versions of a pyramid scheme: Plundering victims and looting assets can be made to look, on the books, like growth.

Dan has a wife named Ann (Marg Helgenberger) and a pretty college-age daughter named Alex (Scarlett Johansson). He is concerned about Alex, especially after finding a pregnancy-testing kit in the garbage, but doesn’t know how concerned he should be until her discovers that Carter, the rat, has not only demoted him but is dating his daughter.

“In Good Company” so far has been the usual corporate slasher movie, in which good people have bad things happen to them because of the evil and greedy system. Then it takes a curious turn, which I will suggest without describing, in which goodness prevails and unexpected humility surfaces. The movie was directed by Paul Weitz, who with his brother Chris made “American Pie” and the Hugh Grant charmer “About a Boy,” and with those upbeat works behind him I didn’t expect “In Good Company” to attain the savagery of Neil LaBute’s “In the Company of Men,” but I was surprised all the same when the sun came out.