Even my affinity for Michael Keaton can’t lift the snarky little indie flick The Last Time up to the level of a sincere recommendation. He’s the best thing here in this mish-mashed tale of ambition and deceit, but one scenery-chewing character does not a film make, alas.

The Last Time marks the feature film writing and directorial debut of Michael Caleo, who honed his chops on television shows like The Sopranos and Rescue Me. The film centers around Ted (Keaton), the cynical but hard-charging, top salesman at Bindview, a high-tech New York City company. Ted is chafed by having to show the ropes to optimistic, enthusiastic Ohio transplant Jamie (Brendan Fraser), but when he meets Jamie’s beautiful fiancee Belisa (Amber Valletta), Ted falls hard. The two begin an illicit affair (getting it on in front of a passed-out Jamie, actually), and the Ted of old slowly emerges. Losing his bitterness, though, somehow robs him of his edge, and sales failures follow. Jamie, meanwhile, continues to flounder at the sales game, and Ted’s guilt over the affair prompts him to feed Jamie what’s left of his own sales leads to try and keep him afloat. For Ted, his dalliance with Belisa really seems to mean something, but can the same be said for her?

The benchmarks here are obvious, whether it’s Glengarry Glen Ross or even a few of the bored-housewife-in-the-new-big city B-plot strands of movies like The Devil’s Advocate. The problem is that The Last Time can’t really measure up to any of the films that it most immediately summons to mind. The performances are certainly not bad, but consistency of tone is a bit of a bugaboo, and the movie’s third act twist seems like a commercial contrivance, a genuflection at genre salability. That’s ironic, I guess, given the movie’s backdrop.

Presented on a single-sided disc in both full-screen and a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, The Last Time comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case, and with a smattering of subtitle options. Its Dolby digital 5.1 audio mix sometimes favors the swell of compower Randy Edelman’s score over dialogue straightforwardness, but wide-ranging dynamism isn’t necessarily part of the film’s conceptual sound design anyway, so it doesn’t become too big of an issue. The only supplemental extra is a clutch of nine deleted scenes, running just under 12 minutes in total. More Keaton isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but this showcase isn’t the best platform for him. And for a movie with such an authorial bent, where’s Caleo? To order the film via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)