
Quaid plays Dan Foreman, an ad salesman for a sports magazine, whose company is taken over by a conglomerate. Suddenly Dan finds that he has a new boss half his age. People get fired. The new boss dates Dan's daughter. Dan's wife is pregnant. You're thinking this can't end well. It does, though maybe not convincingly.
Topher Grace, who plays the new boss, Carter Duryea, manages to do very well in a part that requires him to be scared on the inside and confident on the outside (except with Foreman's daughter), and it's on his character that the movie finally turns. Both he and Foreman learn something about themselves and about the need for change, but it's Carter who has farther to go.
Things probably never work out quite so well in real life as they do in movies like this one, but then again maybe they always do. As Jake Barnes says at the end of The Sun Also Rises, "Isn't it pretty to think so."