Firewall
Directed by Richard Loncraine
Written by Joe Forte
Starring Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany
Classification: PG
Rating: ***
So, a virus has got into your e-mail and is busy sending itself to your entire address book while somebody somehow has duplicated your credit card and racked up a $3,000 bill for silk shirts plus forty bucks for gas at a mall outside Montreal. And you think you've got problems?
Jack Stanfield is head of computer security for a Seattle bank and would-be bank robbers have both hacked into his digital identity and broken into his house. They have taken his family hostage and wired him up for sound and video, forcing him back into the bank to bypass his own security system and transfer $100-million from the accounts of its richest clients offshore.
Firewall, the new Harrison Ford flick, plays very successfully to contemporary anxieties about security. Occasionally, it even plays brilliantly to contemporary anxieties about security: Jack's eight-year-old son has a potentially lethal peanut allergy and the bank robbers know it.
Overall, it's a satisfying example of the classic thriller, with a nifty digital update for these times, in which Ford reprises his now-familiar role (see also Presumed Innocent and The Fugitive) of an isolated but upstanding guy battling crooks who are trying to frame him for their crimes. British director Richard Loncraine (whose last gig was the romantic comedy Wimbledon) doesn't entirely avoid the pitfalls of the genre: Inevitably, the movie goes off the rails in the final scenes, descending here into a melee of flying fists and exploding gas tanks set, inexplicably if very prettily, on an isolated lake. But until those moments, Loncraine does keep a tight rein on the many twists of a cerebral plot.
Perhaps a tad too cerebral. No doubt a real computer expert could pick holes in the complex scheme by which the steely-eyed Bill Cox (a nicely understated Paul Bettany, with his English accent in place to add to the chilly effect) and his team of thugs and nerds plan to steal the money. For the averagely computer literate, however, it's plenty convincing and, indeed, too complicated to be entirely engrossing in its unravelling. Jack somehow wires up a fax machine and his daughter's iPod to steal the money, and somehow uses a photo of the bank files captured on a cellphone to eventually foil the thieves. One is rather thankful for slightly more low-tech tricks - the dog collar with a GPS tag attached; the child's radio-controlled toy car that can interfere with the signal for the thieves' security cameras - which must now stand in for crime-scene snapshots or overheard telephone calls to give an audience their "Aha!" moments.
Indeed, Firewall sometimes leaves one longing for a sidekick to whom Jack could explain all this highfalutin technical stuff. The script by Joe Forte throws Jack's spunky secretary Janet (played with an intriguing degree of quirkiness by Mary Lynn Rajskub) into a rather belated and unconvincing appearance in that role. And poor Virginia Madsen, saddled with the part of the loyal wife Beth, never gets to do anything except look appalled at the prospect of what the bad guys might do to her and her children.
Instead, our hero has only the dastardly Cox to appreciate his digital genius: Mainly, this is an opportunity for Ford to go solo as another jut-jawed Jack battling secret enemies with nary a friend in sight. The man takes full advantage of it.
Kate Taylor