In which 63 year-old Harrison Ford tries to remind us that twenty years ago, he was a viable action star. I have no idea what he was trying to achieve in making Firewall, but he failed. The plot is color-by-numbers without the color: a bank company's security director (Ford) sees his family kidnapped by an insane Brit (Paul Bettany, who I really did expect to have a good career, a while back) if he won't hack into the bank's system to provide a ludicrous sum of money ($100 million) to the kidnapper and his expendable lackeys. There's nothing here that would have seemed original in 1988, although the script has a pornographic obsession with using late 90's high tech as ornamentation: cell phones and GPS provide major plot points, and the opening scene has Ford's character establish his computer smarts with a deft anti-hacker patch, replete with nonsensical technobabble. "Bypass the flibberroofins with this gandersmack routine and they'll jujufruit the withysphere," has about as much to do with computers as any line really found in the film (actually, I'm not sure that line wasn't in the film, and I'm not prepared to rewatch it to find out).

Virginia Madsen (who I really, really expected to have a good career) is along for the ride to embarass herself as Ford's wife, in a weirdly post-feminist role that requires her to be a kickass commando archiect or a screaming heap of tears as the plot requires. None of the performers acquit themselves, although Ford deserves the most scorn for so clearly despising the material when the film is only being made to satiate his ego. I would give the film props for not putting Ford through any stunts a man of his age couldn't really survive (indeed, Ford does many of his own stunts in the film), but it turns out that there's a reason films don't usually do that: it's fucking boring.