FREE ENTERPRISE

Swingers meets Play It Again, Sam — for Trekkies. Despite its horribly unpromising premise, Free Enterprise is a very funny, likable comedy about geeks in love, who never make a move without consulting their inner Kirk for guidance, and who share their deepest, most complicated feelings only with their Mattel Star Wars action figures. Eyebrow-deep in self-conscious, Kevin Williamson–style genre quotations, and occasionally marred by damp-squib Seinfeld-isms (the apparently unintentional homoerotic competitiveness between the protagonists is perhaps the only aspect of the movie that’s not self-conscious), Free Enterprise also features the funniest William Shatner impersonation ever committed to celluloid — by, of all people, William Shatner. Our two nerdy protagonists — loosely modeled on the film’s writer-director team of Rob Burnett and former agent and Sci-Fi Universe editor Mark Altman — collide with the good captain by accident and discover that he’s even more crazed than his reputation has led them to believe. They wind up collaborating with him on his demented dream production, a rap-centric, six-hour version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which he plays every part. Just to hear Shatner rapping the words "Friends, Romans, countrymen . . ." is alone worth the ticket price.