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This is what Hollywood does for a living: take a fairly simple story, crank up the volume, push the situation to an extreme, add carefully measured dollops of action, violence and tension, stir in some good-looking actors, inept police, and super-effective technology, then drive the whole thing into the market with a multi-million dollar promotional campaign. The result? Conventional filmmaking at its finest.
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Paul Bettany and Harrison Ford begin their antagonism in Firewall
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As these things go, Firewall is a pretty good example of the genre. Harrison Ford plays Jack Stanfield, the top "information security" guy at a major bank, whose family (Virginia Madsen, Carly Schroeder, and Jimmy Bennett) are held hostage by a gang of ruthless home invaders under the direction of the ultra-icy British sociopath Bill Cox, played by Paul Bettany.
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Harrison Ford, as Jack Stanfield, is fireproof after an intentional car crash.
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It's "The Desperate Hours" (the 1955 classic, with Humphrey Bogart and Frederic March) meets "Die Hard." But because we're almost 20 years further along than that Bruce Willis cult favorite, the bad guys here deploy even more advanced technology and aim for even larger financial goals.
Don't expect too many surprises in this pot-boiler, not even at the end, where Stanfield and Cox slug it out in an abandoned lake-front house, throwing each other through walls and windows, down stairs and off porches in a desperate battle that the prime demographic for this movie -- teenage boys -- will find a suitable release of the adrenaline and testosterone that have built up in their bodies during the high-tension run-up to this brawl.
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Harrison Ford, Carly Schroeder, Jimmy Bennett and Virginia Madsen cower from home invaders in Firewall
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And don't look too closely at the story, either. There are quite a few loose ends and unexplained lapses. For example, whatever happened to the original pizza delivery boy? Why doesn't the home-security company have a sure-fire way to distinguish a bad guy from a good guy who answers their telephone call in response to an alarm? How can an ordinary radio control jam a closed-circuit TV picture? Where's the payoff from the continuing rivalry and suspicion that swirls around Jack at the bank where he works? And perhaps most worrisome, how does all this mayhem, death, destruction, and international siphoning of big bucks work out after the credits finish rolling?
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Kett Turton, Harrison Ford, and Vincent Gale work some high tech magic in Firewall
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None of these questions really needs an answer, of course, because this is the kind of movie that looks good on the screen, but doesn't go much deeper than one thickness of reflective material.
What's more important is that the tension is palpably visceral, building from almost the very first scene and tightening the screws in the pit of your stomach until it's finally released at the film's climax. The acting is credible enough for a film of this type, the direction is good enough to fill the screen with interesting sights, and the pacing varied enough to hold our attention. The film also answers the question: "What would 280,000 gallons of artificial rain look like?"
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Robert Patrick and Alan Arkin offer professional performances with Harrison Ford in Firewall
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Because the story revolves at least partially around the kidnapped family, which includes two nubile women and the display of many automatic weapons, I found myself continually dreading -- and greatly relieved to discover that the producers did not insist on including any -- sexual predation or excessive gunplay. Nor did the filmmakers stoop to any tearing of clothes or showing of skin. There ought to be some kind of award for films that take what amounts to the high road for this genre.
Conclusion: if you like Hollywood action thrillers, this one is perfectly acceptable.
Rated: PG-13
Opens in theaters February 10, 2006
http://firewallmovie.warnerbros.com/
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