Firewall review

2006.03.05 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Harrison Ford has a hard time turning down roles as earnest, forthright men forced to action. He's too old to play the cowboy, but he's not yet willing to take a backseat while some young punk with a SAG card takes all the glory. In Firewall, he takes up the gauntlet once again, to mixed effect. My rule of thumb for him from now on would be: stop taking roles of characters named "Jack."

Ford plays Jack Stanfield, the top security executive at a major bank, a hands-on kind of guy who can still show the punks in the server room a thing or two about confounding hackers. It's a very silly scene, especially for anyone who knows A) what network security is all about and B) what kind of a guy Ford is in real life. Watching Harrison Ford throw a line of security code into a live production system is just short of hilarious.

He's also a quiet family man who lives in a sprawling house on the Seattle-area rocky cliffs worth somewhere north of $2 million, presumably designed and in part paid for by his architect wife. Virginia Madsen supports in that role, and is just wonderful here, striking all the right tones of competency and concern without being nagging or bitchy.

But that's not the half of it. We also have Robert Patrick, Alan Arkin, and Robert Forster supporting in a subplot. Aside from looking like the starting lineup of a football team at a retirement community, these guys deliver the goods. Unfortunately, like the starting lineup of a football team at a retirement community, they don't actually get to play much.

The bad guys here are outsiders, cowboy punks led by— just guess the nationality of the villain. Come on. If you said "British," you're a winner! Paul Bettany is the man with the plan to rob Ford's bank, and he comes off as just a bit too civil and decent to make us hate him or to be effective. He is holding several family members captive, and Ford still won't behave. The best Bettany can manage is to exploit the allergy of one of his hostages. Jeez, Hollywood's first passive-aggressive bank robber.

The film was directed by Richard Loncraine, who came out of British television and last came to Hollywood with Wimbledon, the lackluster Kirsten Dunst—Paul Bettany vehicle. He did good work with The Gathering Storm (about Churchill) and Richard III (the brilliant WW2-ish version with Ian McKellen), but he seems out of his element with the hardball American thriller genre.

The film is interesting in that it doesn't really play mind games—who's in cahoots? who's not on the level? who's going to crumble when the chips are down? There are a couple of red herrings, as a thriller must include, but for the most part it avoids cliche twists.

And that's the problem.

The story is actually too straight forward. It's missing the air of things-are-not-what-they-seem that every thriller must have. In this case, things really are pretty much just what they seem. And even Jack's not fooled by the red herrings. It's weird.

None of that is likely Loncraine's fault. The screenplay was written by smalltime screenwriter Joe Forte, who apparently hasn't quite mastered the genre. He strikes a couple of very wrong notes from time to time, notably with the allergy bit, the weak merger subplot, and the weak assistance from Ford's assistant. And I don't know who to blame for the too-clever-by-half use of the dog, but somebody ought to pay.

While the cameras are rolling, the story moves along at a decent pace, putting Ford and his family in enough peril to keep us interested, tho constantly thinking that it would be a little too easy to get out of that peril, especially with the bad guys as weak as they seem to be. The ending eventually arrives, like the crosstown bus, right on time but without announcement or fanfare. Exact change, please.

f e e d b a c k

Respond to this page by your e-mail client. Please be sure to mention the title of the article.

s i d e b a r