Firewall

Firewall (2006)

19% (based on 151 movie reviews)

Runtime: 105 minutes

Directed by: Richard Loncraine

Starring: Harrison Ford, Virginia Madsen, Paul Bettany, Robert Patrick, Mary Lynn Rajskub

From: Warner Brothers/Village Roadshow Productions

This is movie I’ve certainly heard of but I have had no desire to ever see it. Through a series of events I won’t recap, I was pretty much forced to watch this earlier this week.

It’s one of those “techno thrillers” (as you can probably gather from the title, if you know much of anything about computers) about a security expert at a bank (Ford) who has his family kidnapped by a gallery of rogues, led by Bettany, and he is forced to rob his own bank and give the money to the rogues. That’s pretty much the entire plot. I overall did not care for it at all. What turned me off the most was how cartoon-y evil the villains were, especially Bettany. You see them slap and punch Madsen, yell and be physically abusive to their kids, and even yell at their barking dog! Plus, Paul even treats his henchmen like crap the entire time, so don’t ask me why they went along with such an ass who is so disloyal to his help. So yeah, you hate the villains but in a “bad” way, and the problem is that you don’t like anyone else either! Talk about bad writing.

As for the technology, not all of it that you see in the flick is made-up babble, but some of it is. I mean, some stuff is rather preposterous. I won’t want to give any spoilers but in this case I have to… it’s to prove a point. You get to see a device involving the scanner from a fax machine wired to an iPod… and it works to capture images! As I heard from someone else, fax machines are so damn slow, how could it possibly capture a viewable image that scrolls by fast? Plus, you see a woman drive an old early 70’s Plymouth vehicle and yet she has an expensive laptop and cell phone… figures.

Yeah, in the end you get some action in what otherwise is just a drama/thriller and it’s a goofy setting and a fight you see is not bad but it’s definitely not one of Harrison’s best by an y stretch of the imagination (not even if you only include the movies he’s done in the past 10 years, when his career has been lean), the impressive-looking cast doesn’t get to do too much (and the guy who played the T-1000 is made to look like a real wimp, so I wouldn’t recommend you go out and see this. Add in no real originality or unexpected plot twists (at least Sorority Row tried to pull off some plot twists, but whether they’re “real” or just red herrings to trick the audience, I’d rather not say in order not to spoil anything, but it’s still more interesting than anything you see in oh so predictable flick like Firewall) and yeah, don’t see this.