YOUNGER, leaner, faster, meaner they may be, but are the corporate whiz-kids better than the old dogs they won't let lie?

The fight-back starts with writer-director Paul Weitz's In Good Company, a bittersweet corporate comedy movie that will annoy then please our blinkered Grumpy Old Men.

Laid-back, fair-handed Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) seems to have a job for life, leading the ad-sales team at the weekly Sports America magazine with paternal care and rare honesty. At 51, life could not be better: the magazine has enjoyed its best year; his wife (Marg Helgenberger) is unexpectedly pregnant and daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson) is off to university, with a second mortgage taking care of business.

Bang! Along comes the self-styled "new ninja assassin", Carter Duryea (Topher Grace from Traffic), a 26-year-old suit appointed to run Dan's team after Malcolm McDowell's Globecom conglomerate eats up Sports Illustrated's publishers for breakfast.

Stoked up on coffee and management babble, Carter's brief is to cut budget and staff while bumping up revenue by 35 per cent, and while he talks the talk, the truth is he has no experience in advertising, his manner is gauche, and his vulnerability is being enhanced by his young bride already giving him the ice treatment.

He needs Dan as his experienced wing-man, a post the deposed boss takes with reluctance, under the burden of his mortgage requirements. Worse still for Dan, with Carter's marriage over, the young hotshot has the cheek to make a play for Alex and the feeling is mutual. No amount of threats will stop the snake having his way.

Weitz, moving up a notch from directing American Pie and About A Boy, serves up two films in one: in the first half he goes for the cynical clout of Jerry Maguire, Oliver Stone's Wall Street or a Billy Wilder movie, but romance then takes over.

Grace's Carter is at once pitiless yet sensitive, full of brio yet nave, unloved yet loving, and so Weitz pulls his audience this way and that in Carter's sweet relationship with Alex. Weitz's wishful romance then stretches as far as having family-man Dan come through his mid-life crisis to win back his old job.

This is a sentimental finale - Carter's fall has only a soft landing - and so In Good Company ends up strangely old fashioned, swimming against the tide of the times without true conviction.

Updated: 10:37 Friday, February 18, 2005