Hack Job

Harrison Ford swings back into mediocre action mode in "Firewall."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: See Harrison Ford look really, really serious.

The Downside: A not-so-killer app.

    Let's face it- computers are interesting.  Movies about computers, unless they are talking in the psychotic passive-aggressive whisper of HAL 9000 or sending killer robots through time in the likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, better yet, Kristianna Loken) are not.  You can blame the domestication of the internet in the mid-1990s for movies like Sandra Bullock's The Net, which was not as much bad as so pointless it was quickly swept from the cinematic memoryscape for all time.  Nowadays, you can thank everything from camera phones to iPods to more and more Nightline exposes on computer crime and identity theft for Firewall, another insignificant thriller destined to hold the shelf life of a block of Velveeta cheese sitting on a counter on a summer afternoon.  Yeah, okay, it's technically about computers: Seattle bank security honcho Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) comes home from work to discover his family taken hostage by thugs who must have graduated from the Second Unit School of Henchmanship (First lesson: chain smoking cigarettes.  Second lesson: guttural growls and five o'clock shadow.) under the leadership of a suave, smooth-talking mastermind named Cox.  Like in The Net, we don't need to see Cox kill people to know he's the Bad Guy- we can tell he's an evil man because he's the only one in the picture with a British accent.  Cox wants Stanfield to break into the bank's computer databases and transfer $100 million to offshore accounts or, well, you're not expecting anything new in the threat department, are you? 

    The problem is that Firewall plays like a really slick-looking website with no real content.  It's promise of being a high-tech hacker thriller fades almost immediately, when it appears that the extent of screenwriter Joe Forte's research into the real how's and why's of techno-crime and security is exhausted in two lines of dialogue.  I may be mistaken, but no one yet has figured out how to make tapping on keyboards and a flurry of 1s and 0s into the stuff of a really keen suspense movie, although some have come close (I'm thinking about that other 90s artifact, Hackers, which made up the deficit with attitude and atmosphere).  Even the title itself is a clue that the movie is all hawk, no wares- an enigma that, as far as I could figure, had nothing to do with the plot and was selected for its about middling-level geek connotations and decent exposure in the modern lexicon.  Firewall is so out of the loop it can only keep up the charade for so long- but by the end it goes back to the old (sub)standards: car chases, foot chases, and gunplay a plenty.

    It isn't just the Discovery Channel distance from the subject matter that does Firewall in- this is a fairly preposterous movie.  Now, that by itself doesn't really matter.  I really enjoyed last August's Red Eye even though not a believable moment passed in front of my eyes.  The difference, I think, is two-fold: first, Red Eye's plot was little more than a MacGuffin, the set dressing needed to get the real show, the psychological showdown between a woman and a would-be assassin, moving.  There is no psychology at play in Firewall.  In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any evidence of synapses firing at all.  Neither Stanfield nor Cox nor his gaggle of henchmen do anything in their own interest.  Take a scene where the crooks kidnap Stanfield's family and drive them out of the city.  Watch this scene and ask, why in the name of God did they bring the dog, other than to provide a way for Stanfield to locate them later on?  In psychological suspenses like Collateral and Red Eye personalities are stripped down to the barest desires and then thrown into the mix.  In Firewall all the characters, good guys and bad, act like they've read the next ten pages of the scrip and are looking for the easiest way to cut through the tree hole.

    The second difference is that Red Eye could actually maintain its own illusion.  Firewall often acts so retro to common sense that I wouldn't be surprised if the shooting script was covered with glib little margin notes saying, "Oh, this is so full of sh**!"  In order to make sure he plays nice, the Bad Guys send Stanfield to work wired with hidden cameras and microphones.  Stanfield tries to outwit them by typing out an emergency email- which is then wiped clean by the evil hackers.  Now riddle me this: if these villains are tech-savvy enough to infiltrate and manipulate a bank's private email system, then what do they need with Harrison Ford?  I know what you're going to say- you're not supposed to ask these kinds of questions in an action movie.  Look, I'm not a complete prude, but give me idea one of how I'm supposed to believe in a movie that doesn't even believe in itself?

    Ford has been in better movies than this, but let's face it, he hasn't produced anything bordering on original since The Fugitive.  There's a reason why he emerged from a George Lucas blockbuster as the only one with an established career; few play the everyman with as much poise as he does.  But the days of Witness and Indiana Jones are over and it feels, at least from where I sit in the bleachers, that Ford has morphed into the one-note, angry curmudgeon role he's done a cookie-cutter act with between Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and Air Force One.  Boy, does he get angry in Firewall, but by this point it is little more than a template for him to say lines in the variation of "Get (out of, off of, away from) my (plane, boat, family)!"  As the snarky Cox, Paul Bettany... well, he'll get a better chance when he plays a murderous albino monk in Ron Howard's adaptation of The Da Vinci Code in May.  Virginia Madsen, who was up for an Oscar last year for Sideways, is completely wasted as Ford's wife, who holds no other function but to look defiant and get pistol whipped on random occasions.

    Firewall is a February movie- slick, shoddy, and completely disposable- designed to open fast and vanish.  I remember a scene from Hackers where a group of computer whizzes get excited over a Pentium computer, and wonder where Firewall will be when iPods and digital cameras have become passé.  Personally, I doubt it will even get that far.  Movies this undernourished in both body and soul never hang around long enough to achieve the status of retro kitsch.  The 90s are over, the bubble has burst, but somebody forgot to tell Firewall.  C

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