http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/movies/13824243.htm By Bruce Newman Mercury News Feb. 08, 2006 If you think your family is dysfunctional, consider the fate of the perpetually imperiled screen tribe of Harrison Ford: wife kidnapped (1988); wife and daughter abducted (1992); wife murdered (1993); wife and daughter taken hostage (1997); wife killed in plane crash (1999). Ford is the big daddy of domestic disaster, a Swiffer mop of calamity. ``Firewall'' is Ford's latest excavation of the family-in-peril thriller, and it is a mostly rote attempt to reboot ``The Desperate Hours'' -- the taut psychological standoff between Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March from 1955 -- for the computer age. Instead of dramatic tension, ``Firewall'' makes do with a lot of frantic typing at computer keyboards. It's like watching Microsoft's Service Pack 2 download for nearly two hours. This time, Ford plays Jack Stanfield, the designer of an impenetrable computer firewall that protects the Seattle bank where he is a trusted and beloved figure. But that all changes when super-hacker Bill Cox (played by Paul Bettany) sends his team of hench-geeks bursting into Jack's home -- laptops drawn -- to take his wife (Virginia Madsen) and two children hostage. Cox has figured out that the back door through which he can slip past the bank's security system is Jack himself. You don't go to a Harrison Ford movie expecting gritty realism, but even by the lowered standards of the modern thriller, what finally causes ``Firewall'' to collapse is a series of increasingly improbable plot twists. The most laughable of these can't be discussed without revealing the movie's climax, but it is accompanied by what is sure to be one of the year's funniest lines (though not intentionally): ``Where are they, Rusty?'' Jack asks the family schnauzer, completely serious. ``Where have they gone?'' This comes shortly after he uses his daughter's iPod to hotwire the bank's servers, moving $100 million to Cox's offshore account, while downloading Sharon Stone's Celebrity Playlist from iTunes. (OK, he doesn't really get the playlist, just the $100 million.) Cox is one of those suave, arrogant, ill-tempered, blond British bad guys, and Bettany plays him as if he had been stamped from a cookie cutter -- he's Jeremy Irons 2.0. Cox is supposed to be ruthless, willing to stop at nothing to get his loot. But when Jack makes a couple of lame attempts to outwit him early in the movie, Cox is strangely indulgent of his prize pawn. And when Jack's family does something that infuriates him, Cox gives them a cold-blooded demonstration of what will happen if they get out of line again by cruelly executing one of his own men. This is so inexplicable and bizarre that it reminded me of the famous scene in ``Blazing Saddles'' when the town's black sheriff takes himself hostage. Trying to convince a mob of hostile white people to drop the guns they have pointed at him, he points his own gun at his head and threatens to blow it off, then pleads for mercy from himself. In ``Blazing Saddles,'' this disarms both the town's nitwits and the audience. In ``Firewall,'' it just seems like the movie is too weak-kneed to kill a hostage, even though that's the only leverage Cox has got. Eventually, Jack goes on the run with his secretary Janet, who monitors a laptop computer to give him satellite updates on the whereabouts of his family. This would be preposterous enough, even if Janet weren't played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, the potato-faced actress who plays Chloe on ``24,'' where she is the loopy girl Friday to another Jack. By the time Jack Stanfield drives Janet's car toward the picture's climactic fight scene, the story has become so convoluted that the two of them have a thudding conversation covering all the important plot twists to make sure everyone is completely caught up. I won't spoil the ending, even though anyone who has followed Ford's career -- and how could you miss it? -- has seen it before. One nice touch: Cox continues to demonstrate what could happen to Jack's family by helpfully killing off his own henchmen. By the time he and Jack meet, the only remaining question is whether he will take himself hostage. -=- `Firewall' * 1/2 Rated PG-13 (some intense sequences of violence) Cast Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Robert Patrick, Mary Lynn Rajskub Director Richard Loncraine Writer Joe Forte Running time 1 hour, 45 minutes _________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org
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