Haven't we seen this movie before? Wasn't there another movie in which Harrison Ford was again trying to defend his family against rude intruders crashing into his home uninvited? Was it called Patriot Games (1992)? Here we have the same idea. In Patriot Games the prime mover was politics. In this one, it is money. But it's pretty much the same song and dance. A bunch of money-crazy hi-tech maniacs take Jack Stanfield's family hostage. Why? Because Stanfield (played by Ford) is the VP of Security at a big fat bank in Seattle (rain rain rain) controlling hundreds of millions of dollars. Since he is the guy who set up the security firewall, he can also penetrate it if he wants to and transfer $100 million dollars to an offshore account. But to do that, he needs a little convincing. And that's where his wife, daughter and son comes into play. They are taken hostage in their own home until Stanfield delivers the goods. As Stanfield reports for work as though nothing has happened and tries to find a way to get out the jam, he is faced with the dilemma of not letting anyone know what's going on back at home. Because if his office mates know anything about the attack and the hostage crisis, they might call the cops. Then the bad guys can say goodbye to the $100 million while Stanfield says the same to his family. What makes things worse is that the leader of the psychopaths, the tall and lanky blond Bill Cox (played by Paul Bettany) looks and talks just like an upper-class banker (complete with the obligatory British accent). So he visits Stanfield at his office pretending he is a colleague of his and takes a personal tour of the super secure servers inside the bank's well-protected data vault. In one scene, Stanfield manages to capture the numbers of 10,000 accounts by a silly home-made contraption made from his daughter's iPod, believe it or not! All he needs to do next is to transfer $10,000 from each account to the offshore number. At the end, Stanfield turns the tables around on the psychos. He hacks into the Cayman Islands bank account of the bad guys and starts to withdraw huge chunks of dineros while he has Cox on the phone. They will either let go of his family or he will deplete all they have as they watch the proceedings live on a laptop. The final confrontation between the good and the evil takes place in the form of a hand to hand combat at a remote seaside house. (Note for the scriptwriter -- always personalize the core conflict.) After crashing through the floors, staircases and (yes) even walls, Stanfield and Cox find themselves in a ditch outside the house, trying to gouge each other's eyes out. In the end (of course) much older Stanfield manages to bury the sharp end of a pick ax in between the shoulder blades of the much younger and more powerful Cox. Why? Because Stanfield is the good guy and he has to win regardless of his physical condition. A formulaic thriller that begins and ends as expected, true to all the honorable cliches known to Hollywood. Watch it if 1) there is nothing better on the tube, 2) you are a true Harrison Ford fan, or 3) you really believe that it's possible to rob a modern bank by using nothing more than the scanning rod of a fax machine and an iPod. A yawning 6 out of 10. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
