The Strip: Honorable and Pleasant and Not Great

This well-meaning but dull indie comedy
about the existential pain of nine-to-five drudgery is begging—to
an unseemly degree—for an Office Space comparison. It
includes a rumpled, charming everyman in the lead (Rodney Scott,
pleasant enough), a pretty and redemptive love interest (Jenny Wade, so
sugary she might melt away in a drizzle), a hilarious South Asian
person, an asshole boss, lots of silly motivational jargon, about a
bajillion wacky supporting characters, and a soulless business keeping
them all in uncomfortable company. But though the comparison is
unavoidable, The Strip lacks its predecessor’s pitch-perfect
deadpan oddness and, more importantly, its really, really funny
jokes.

But The Strip is, to be fair, medium likable. The
film concerns a team of employees at a strip-mall electronics store
called Electri-City hawking shitty off-brand equipment to the three or
four people a day who happen to wander through. Our dissatisfied hero
is Kyle, who went to college (and presumably did not major in Shitty
Boom-Box Salesmanometry) but has been forced into a management-training
position by his dad, the owner of Electri-City. Kyle is unhappy about
this.

The Strip is an honorable first attempt from
writer/director Jameel Khan, getting capable performances out of its
mostly unknown cast. (The film’s biggest-name star is Dave Foley. Its
second biggest star is Missy—I mean “Mom”—from Bill
& Ted’s Excellent Adventure. She plays the mom.) And though
The Strip squeezes a laugh in here and there (“Abraham
Lincoln,” says Foley during a back-room pep talk, “had a little
teamwork problem—it was called the Civil War”), you just wish
Khan would try harder not to try so hard.