“Free Enterprise” is a little movie that is a surprisingly well-written romantic comedy with virtually an encyclopaedia’s worth of tv, movie and comic references. It’s sort-of like “Clerks” but better.

In this film, two geeky losers (Eric McCormack “Holy Man”, Rafer Weigel “I Am Sam”) live their lives by movies/tv, especially the original series of “Star Trek” but when they meet their idol and star of it: William Shatner they realise he might just be as lame as they are. Everything from “Brady Bunch” to “Logan’s Run” to “Spawn” comics to “Basic Instinct” gets brought up here; it’s pretty darn impressive to say the least.

The main guys are good because they’re sad losers but there’s something they live for and it isn’t the conventional stuff like wealth or fame but more just to live out their lives via the moral code of a tv show and that’s funny material. William Shatner plays himself as drunkard that isn’t so suave with the ladies and wants to make a musical version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”; it’s a good performance because Shatner shows that he has a sense of humour about things. A line mentioning the hostility between him and the other cast members of “Star Trek” perfectly illustrates that.

“Free Enterprise” is a good movie smothered in so many references that you get the feeling that the people who made this really love movies and tv shows. It isn’t some big movie and it doesn’t just try to make you sit through it just to see Shatner and a few references; it’s a genuinely good film and that’s why I enjoyed so much. Sure, it’s not incredible but for a movie about a couple of nerds and William Shatner, it goes about as far as it could go. If you’re into “Star Trek” then you have to watch “Free Enterprise”; it’s just that simple!