Firewall
starring Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Robert Patrick, Carly Shroeder, Jimmy Bennett, Robert Forster and Alan Arkin
written by Joe Forte
directed by Richard Loncrain
I like Harrison Ford. His characters always feel like the middle aged, middle class Everyman of North American culture. Clumsy, harried, burdened with teenage children and a mortgage, Ford’s characters often express a middle class ethic in dire situations where he finds the strength fired by moral conviction to persevere when he never suspected he had the strength to start with. That’s very appealing to middle America, I guess, because often Ford’s characters follow the working-9-to-5, dedicated-to-his-family worker bee drone path in society. Through video and DVD rentals Harrison Ford is the most watched actor in the history of Hollywood, so there must be a lot of people out there who like watching him - or, maybe just looking at him. I like Paul Bettany very much, too. I have seen him in a few films now. Why I like him is hard to say: his physical appearance, the sound of his voice, the way that he moves, etc. The usual things.
Firewall combines the time-tested bank robbery plot with high-tech computer voodoo. But the story is one we have seen before: robbers kidnap a bank manager/president’s family and hold them as a lever to blackmail the man to open the bank vault. Typically, there is always some arcane hole in the plan, and the plot fails. The complexities of computer technology and programs represent more room for thrilling new generations of movie watchers. What is old is new again.