Thursday, June 08, 2006

Movie Review: Firewall

We rented the movie Firewall last night. It was pretty good - we're both big fans of Harrison Ford (Hollywood Homicide notwithstanding), and as usual, he gave a pretty good performance. Having said that, it must kind of get old for Ford, since he's played the same "Don't screw with my family" kind of guy in lots of movies (The Devil's Own, Air Force One, Patriot Games, The Fugitive (kinda)). Anyway, there were a couple of "yeah, right" moments, but overall, it was quite believable, and very entertaining. The ending was kind of disappointing though — it was almost as if they realized "Hey, we're out of time, let's end this now". Some other comments:

  • These hackers are good enough to be able to hack the desktop computer of the VP of security of a bank, and yet can't just get the money out themselves? OK, so maybe getting to the desktop is one thing, but getting access to the real customer data is something else. That's certainly possible. But didn't they realize that the terminals in the server room (required for their plan to work) were just removed for security reasons? I would think that this would be the kind of thing that would show up in a recent email to the VP of security during the merger process. Haven't they been monitoring his email for awhile, watching for possible snags in their plans?
  • I don't think you can use a scanner from a fax machine to scan a computer screen. Even if you could, the scrolling was way too fast for it to work as reliably as depicted.
  • The phone rings and nobody does anything, so the kid goes to answer it. The bad guys completely freak out, and then afterwards, yell at the mom to do as she's told. But nobody told her anything! The bad guys should have given her instructions the second the phone started ringing, or simply said "nobody answer it". Bad guys is so stupid.
  • Being a fan of "24", the appearance of Chloe was a little weird, especially since she worked for a technical guy but wasn't technical herself. Going into the church, asking Bobby to borrow his cell phone, and then just walking out with it was a classic Chloe move.
  • SPOILER: Say you're the wife at the end of this movie. The nightmare is finally over. Your family is safe, the bad guys are all dead, and your husband is badly beaten and can barely stand up straight. So what do you do? Stand there and look at him from 50 feet away for a full 30 seconds, and then stroll slowly over to give him a hug? No, you'd run to him as fast as you can. Same for the kids, for that matter
  • SPOILER: Why the hell did the bad guys bring the dog with them? Other than as a plot device, of course.

Despite these little nits (which I can find in about any movie), I enjoyed this one.

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