This film would have been a whole lot better if every character in it wasn't a caricature. Store clerk Mark (Ethan Embry) and shoplifter Warren (Brendan Sexton III) were the worst. There might be teens that clueless and arrogant respectively, but in this film, they were just plain annoying. And the record shop manager Joe Reaves (Anthony LaPaglia) spent an awful lot of time deliberating over what he'd do about the missing nine grand. Seemed pretty simple to me, but in keeping with the one big happy family concept, he presided over the madness going on with the serenity of a Buddhist monk. Maybe I'm just a little too far removed from the target audience for this picture but it did nothing for me. The story was fairly predictable about how the missing money would be replaced, while the teen angst aspect of all the employees wound up pretty much resolved by the time the closing credits rolled. Not very comparable to real life, but I guess the picture had it's time and place, which is to say, it's a good thing the Nineties are over.

Just another version of the Breakfast Club, but in the 90s version.

A group of young people work at the independent Empire Records. While closing up, Lucas (Rory Cochrane) discovers a contract in manager Joe Reaves (Anthony LaPaglia)'s office to sell out the store to big corporate Music Town. Lucas tries his luck with the store's cash to save the place and promptly loses $9k in Atlantic City. The next morning, A.J. (Johnny Whitworth) and Mark (Ethan Embry) are the first at the store. Corey Mason (Liv Tyler) and flirty friend Gina (Renée Zellweger) have a crush on 80's pop star Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield) who is coming to the store. His time is mostly pass and even his assistant Jane (Debi Mazar) doesn't like his music. Angry Deb (Robin Tunney) shaves her head. A.J. vows to reveal his love for Corey. They catch a young shoplifter who claims to be Warren Beatty. It's going to be a crazy day.This is a crazy wild mess of young people fun. The music is loud and mostly good. The story is full of teen angst. The best is the cast of great young up and comers. Tyler and Zellweger are in short skirts. Tunney actually shaves her hair. It's lots of teen melodramatic fun. The characters are appealing. It's certainly possible to be get-off-my-lawn on this movie but not me. Even a bad sleazy Maxwell Caulfield can't get me out of this movie.

Once upon a time there were these places called record stores. People went to these places to buy music. Empire Records is a movie set in such a place. The young employees of Empire Records band together to try and prevent their quirky, independent store being sold to one of those big, bad corporations which will turn the place into a soulless, generic Music Town. If they'd only known the changes which would be coming to the music industry in the next decade they wouldn't have bothered. Anyone up for Empire Records 2: The Day iPods Put Us Out of Business? Eh, probably not. One movie spent with this bunch of unremarkable, unoriginal slackers is enough.Empire Records is a movie which is overly familiar. We've seen so many similar stories with similar characters. There's nothing to make this movie stand out from the crowd. All the clichéd characters we've come to expect from a movie like this are here. The slut, the virgin, the depressed loner, the artist, the stoner. There's the eccentric guy, the comic relief guy, the father figure. Every character fits into a neat little box. The result is less than inspiring. The movie is incredibly predictable. There's no real drama. Attempts at comedy fall flat. The whole thing seems very unfocused. All the characters have their own little stories. But we never really spend enough time with any of those characters to become fully engaged in those stories. Everyone and everything gets tossed together into a big stew and the end result is underwhelming. Some of the performances are pretty good, with the girls generally coming off better than the boys. Watching this movie it's easy to see why Renée Zellweger, Robin Tunney and Liv Tyler were destined for bigger and better things. The guys though are rather forgettable. Probably the best male performance comes from Maxwell Caulfield playing a washed-up pop star. At least his character adds a little something different to the movie. Otherwise it's all about this group of young slackers, none of whom has an individual story which stands out and whose overriding collective quest, to save the store from corporate blandness, isn't particularly compelling. The best thing the movie has to offer is its soundtrack, a nice mid-1990s musical time capsule. But tossing some snippets from some good songs into the mix, and somehow managing to entertainingly shoehorn Gwar into the plot, isn't enough to save the movie. We've seen a lot of other movies like this one. Most of those other movies have been much better than Empire Records.