Punch the Clock (2016) A Repartição do Tiempo
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 40m, rated 6.0 by 140 cinematizens.
DNA: Brazil.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: McKinsey management par excellence.
Tagline: Suspicions confirmed!
The central patent office in Brasilia is a national disgrace. The work routine is so slow that it takes more than eight years to approve a fully documented simple submission. Its staff members draw comics, smoke dope, sleep off last night’s drunk, fornicate, watching telenovelas, flip through an enormous pile of glossy magazines, use the office phones for personal long distance calls, anything but work.
The result is a mountainous backlog. Meh.
Then the media attacks and it is time for desperate measures. The manager feels the political heat to do something. Consulting his McKinsey manual, his first thought is to redo the façade of the building to deflect attention, but turns out that is the wrong move. Then thanks to an invention that looks like a punch clock for employees buried deep in the basement awaiting patent approval is a device that clones individuals.
Aha! Fresh from a McKinsey seminar, manager has a brilliant idea. He will trap his staff members in the hidden bomb shelter below the building and enslave them to work, while populating the office with clones who can continue to do nothing. The slaves below have to work to get food and water. In the bomb shelter one of the employee suffers a terminal allergic reaction from exposure to work for the first time.
Those imprisoned try to escape. The upstairs clones slowly realise something is amiss when work gets done.
***
It is a merciless critique of rule-bound bureaucracy that emphases everything but getting the job done. The desperate phone call to emergency services is a cackle, but too convoluted for summary. The gist of it is no matter what is said, the response is that it is someone else’s responsibility. Call another number. (The joke is that the same operator answers all the numbers in the run-around.)
This also applied to the Mutt and Jeff police officers who eventually arrive and interview the informant, not about the crime, but about the definition of the situation to see if it is really their responsibility. The arguments about definitions reminded me of too many seminars where we never got to the point.
The machine is referred to as a time machine but it is easier to explain with cloning.