Warning! Major, Major spoilers ahead! I've read a number of the other reviews here and it seems only a handful of people actually figured this movie out. Of course, I may be completely off base as well, but the reviews that make a comparison to Incident at Owl Creek are, I believe, on the right track. Basically, this is a psychotic version of Incident at Owl Creek. Let me try to outline it here - either spoiling it terribly if you haven't seen it or possibly helping you appreciate it a bit more if you have:
The first 25 minutes introduce us to Bob(Christian Slater), an office worker who is working up the courage to do the disgruntled postal worker routine. The rest of the movie happens in Bob's imagination in the instant before he does the actual deed. It is important to remember - both during the first 25 minutes and throughout the rest of the movie - that we are seeing Bob's coworkers through his eyes...and Bob is psychotic. I say it's important to remember this because all the people around Bob are the Office Workers from Hell. They are so cartoonish and over the top that if you don't catch on that this is how Bob sees them and not the actual people they probably are, you may be prone to eject this DVD and not give it the chance it deserves. There is the thoroughly nasty immediate supervisor, the mindless and boorish fellow cubicle workers, the office slut, the sleazy boss and the unattainable beauty of a secretary.
In the real world, these would all be fairly normal denizens of a fairly normal office. They may have all at one time or another committed some small personal slight or evidenced some character trait that caused terrible damage to Bob's psyche. But remember, Bob is gonzo - and since we're seeing everything from Bob's perspective, their flaws are exponentially magnified and we can't blame him for wanting to exterminate this herd of troglodytes.
When Bob's moment of decision comes, we suddenly find ourselves (as we learn later) in an extended fantasy where instead of being the homicidal maniac, Bob becomes the hero as he thwarts another psycho partway through stealing Bob's thunder with a massacre of his own. The rest of the movie relentlessly unveils the self-destructive nature of Bob's twisted mind. Bob warps his virginal heroine into someone neither so virginal nor so heroic as she ought to be, and even though Bob does everything right (of course he does - it's his fantasy after all!) a relationship with her becomes impossible. His imagined promotion to Vice President of Creative Thinking only reveals how pathetic his creative thinking is. His fantasy of the big boss is even worse than he had previously thought. Heroic Bob imagines himself with every advantage he can think of, yet cannot imagine any of it turning out good for him or for anyone else. By the end of the movie we find him back at his moment of decision, gun in hand, about to begin his rampage. It is at this moment he has his one instant of clarity: When he is unable to distinguish whether the woman at the water cooler is his unattainable beauty or the office slut, he finally and mercifully comes to the realization that the only person in the room who is damaged goods is the one holding the pistol. And in his one moment of lucidity, he culls the herd.
Now, how do I know this? It all becomes clear - or should - in the last few moments of the movie, when his home is cordoned off and everything in it is as it was at the beginning of the movie; when the TV interviews are only the boilerplate, "He was a quiet man" quotes and say nothing about the Hero Who Turns Homicidal Maniac that would be splashed all over the news had the previous hour been factual rather than fantasy.
I would have rated the movie much lower if I hadn't figured out what was going on, but once understood it becomes an interesting study of a psychotic mind. And I would have rated it even higher if they would have added about a 5 to 10 minute epilogue depicting the people around Bob as they actually were, rather than as the monsters Bob showed us they were. I don't think it would have hurt the twist at all - in fact, I think the stark contrast could really have added a jolt for the audience at the end as people tried to figure out how all these rotten characters suddenly became so, well, normal.
The first 25 minutes introduce us to Bob(Christian Slater), an office worker who is working up the courage to do the disgruntled postal worker routine. The rest of the movie happens in Bob's imagination in the instant before he does the actual deed. It is important to remember - both during the first 25 minutes and throughout the rest of the movie - that we are seeing Bob's coworkers through his eyes...and Bob is psychotic. I say it's important to remember this because all the people around Bob are the Office Workers from Hell. They are so cartoonish and over the top that if you don't catch on that this is how Bob sees them and not the actual people they probably are, you may be prone to eject this DVD and not give it the chance it deserves. There is the thoroughly nasty immediate supervisor, the mindless and boorish fellow cubicle workers, the office slut, the sleazy boss and the unattainable beauty of a secretary.
In the real world, these would all be fairly normal denizens of a fairly normal office. They may have all at one time or another committed some small personal slight or evidenced some character trait that caused terrible damage to Bob's psyche. But remember, Bob is gonzo - and since we're seeing everything from Bob's perspective, their flaws are exponentially magnified and we can't blame him for wanting to exterminate this herd of troglodytes.
When Bob's moment of decision comes, we suddenly find ourselves (as we learn later) in an extended fantasy where instead of being the homicidal maniac, Bob becomes the hero as he thwarts another psycho partway through stealing Bob's thunder with a massacre of his own. The rest of the movie relentlessly unveils the self-destructive nature of Bob's twisted mind. Bob warps his virginal heroine into someone neither so virginal nor so heroic as she ought to be, and even though Bob does everything right (of course he does - it's his fantasy after all!) a relationship with her becomes impossible. His imagined promotion to Vice President of Creative Thinking only reveals how pathetic his creative thinking is. His fantasy of the big boss is even worse than he had previously thought. Heroic Bob imagines himself with every advantage he can think of, yet cannot imagine any of it turning out good for him or for anyone else. By the end of the movie we find him back at his moment of decision, gun in hand, about to begin his rampage. It is at this moment he has his one instant of clarity: When he is unable to distinguish whether the woman at the water cooler is his unattainable beauty or the office slut, he finally and mercifully comes to the realization that the only person in the room who is damaged goods is the one holding the pistol. And in his one moment of lucidity, he culls the herd.
Now, how do I know this? It all becomes clear - or should - in the last few moments of the movie, when his home is cordoned off and everything in it is as it was at the beginning of the movie; when the TV interviews are only the boilerplate, "He was a quiet man" quotes and say nothing about the Hero Who Turns Homicidal Maniac that would be splashed all over the news had the previous hour been factual rather than fantasy.
I would have rated the movie much lower if I hadn't figured out what was going on, but once understood it becomes an interesting study of a psychotic mind. And I would have rated it even higher if they would have added about a 5 to 10 minute epilogue depicting the people around Bob as they actually were, rather than as the monsters Bob showed us they were. I don't think it would have hurt the twist at all - in fact, I think the stark contrast could really have added a jolt for the audience at the end as people tried to figure out how all these rotten characters suddenly became so, well, normal.