Mediocrity, I'm afraid, would be a generous compliment for "Firewall." It is the story of Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford), a security specialist at Landrock Pacific Bank, who lives in an inordinately nice lake house designed by his wife Beth (Virginia Madsen), an architect. I mention that his wife is an architect because that's pretty much all she is; I suspect that, rather than waste time creating a three-dimensional female character in an action thriller, the screenplay chose instead to give her about fifteen lines of dialogue and an interesting-sounding career. Although, then again, the fact that Beth is an architect allows her to have once designed a secret escape tunnel in the family's basement just in case she or her two children were ever taken hostage by bank robbers. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Turns out that escape tunnel was a good idea, as the very bank robbers Beth no doubt had in mind show up at the house one night with AK-47s, take Beth and the two kids hostage, and tell Jack that he's got to steal $100 million from the bank he works at or his family dies. Their leader is a stately British gentleman named Bill Cox -- played by a stately British gentleman named Paul Bettany -- whose kindly manner and disarming smile mask a bitter chilliness of spirit. Bettany has played sociopaths before in films far better than this (his performance in "Gangster No. 1" still gives me nightmares), but here he is crammed by commercial necessity into yet another cardboard criminal mastermind incapable of any humanity, or for that matter plausibility. At one point, he orders a nameless henchman to break a boy's kneecaps, but since this is a PG-13 movie, Harrison Ford is able to talk him out of it in five seconds flat.
Director Richard Loncraine, who has somehow managed to go from "Richard III" to this, seems profoundly uninterested in the hostage situation as anything other than a plot device to turn Harrison Ford into the bank robbers' pawn. The family never even looks particularly alarmed that men with guns have barged into their house; ten minutes after they have been taken hostage, we see Beth and the kids casually playing Monopoly while they wait for Jack to come back with the bank's money.
What the bank robbers hadn't counted on, however, is that Jack is being played by Harrison Ford, and is therefore required to sabotage the bad guys' plans by whatever means necessary. The result is a loosely connected string of car chases, fist-fights, explosions and Baptist churches (I'm dead serious), during which time Ford miraculously regrows the bulletproof skin that he boasted back in his Indiana Jones days.
I realize the preceding description makes "Firewall" sound like it could be, though not the next "Citizen Kane" perhaps, at least a couple hours of big, dumb fun. Well, I assure you it is quite dumb, and about two hours too big, but it is never fun. Even stupid movies require interesting characters if they are to work at the most basic level; this movie barely has any characters at all. We never learn anything about the kidnapped family other than the wife's professional vocation, nor are the band of kidnappers defined by anything more than the occasional snarl. Even Jack himself is utterly devoid of humanity, a character that seems like a watered-down mixture of every role that Harrison Ford has ever played, minus any personality.
And then there is the unfortunate matter of Ford himself, who spends most of "Firewall" trying and failing to hide his profound embarrassment for the material. Many critics have called Ford too old for the part, which I think is rather unfair; after all, a 60-year-old security specialist's family is no less vulnerable to kidnapping than that of a 30-year-old one.
I'm afraid to say that my complaint with Ford was not that he was miscast but that he wasn't very good. The charismatic mannerisms that I have always found so appealing in Ford's earlier work (the quick, lopsided grin, the wry raise of an eyebrow) seem strangely slowed here, a beat behind the action, as if the actor was just too tired to put in his best effort that day.
In what is arguably the most ludicrous scene in the film, Ford looks genuinely apologetic to the audience as he explains to the bank robbers that, in addition to its 10,000-song capacity, an iPod can also function as a tool for illegal account transfers. Who knew, right?
Now, I don't want to sound like a snob. I know there is a place for films like "Firewall," squarely in the New Releases section of Blockbuster where they can earn a quick buck before slipping out of the collective consciousness of the movie-going public forever. But given the talent involved in this project both in front of and behind the camera, would the slightest drop of ambition (or even effort) be too much to ask?
There's a moment in the movie when Harrison Ford growls at Paul Bettany, "This whole thing is going to fall apart around you. Just give up now while you still can." I swear, in that single moment, I could sense that he was talking to the filmmakers.
