Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 3 star

February 27th, 2006 by surlaroute

While it’s competently put together and certainly worth seeing once, I guess you can’t expect every documentary to be as entertaining as a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock effort. I really couldn’t find much in this one to connect to. Though I don’t exactly have the whole history of Enrongate up in my brain, there was hardly anything revealed in these two hours that surprised me, that I couldn’t have concluded from my own limited knowledge of the whole thing (funky stuff happening behind closed doors at a big business, someone blew a whistle and suddenly tonnes of paper shreddings started coming out the back), and not a lot of it struck me as particularly important. It’s fun to see the big executive fat cats drown in their own feces, but how many ways can it be explained by people talking to the camera? I’d rather (if that’s the right word) watch the terrifying, more generalised, The Corporation than this any day of the week; and much as I hated The Aristocrats, I kinda wish that movie had this one’s Best Documentary slot at the Oscars … I mean, at least it was different … Needless-to-say, I’ll be pretty stunned if this by-the-numbers piece wins.