Firewall

How It Rates: ***
Starring: Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Violence (high), Language (low)

Harrison Ford has every right to say he's getting too old for this. He's blasted his way out of Mos Eisley as Han Solo, cracked the whip as Indiana Jones, chased replicants in Blade Runner, thrown around some executive power in Air Force One, done the super-spook thing in Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger, and run for his life in The Fugitive. When he caught a breath, he did the less pulse-pounding Sabrina, Regarding Henry and Working Girl. A lot of people would decide to mellow out. Then came Hollywood Homicide, and the lovable action hero was back, running around with a blaster and trying to ride a kid's bike. Another Indiana Jones picture is in the works.

So I watch Ford in Firewall and see an old friend sucked back into a genre I'm not sure he can handle after all these years. And yet he shows he can. Indiana Jones 4 will not break him in half.

Ford plays Jack Stanfield, a bank security manager who becomes the pawn of slick thief Bill Cox (Bettany), who comes from that large family of British-accented movie thieves. Cox has done his homework. You can spend a lot of time and bandwith breaking into a bank's iron-wall computer system, or you can kidnap the security manager's wife and two kids and force him to do it for you. So Cox and his gang of nerd henchmen strike, and they wire up Stanfield with a hidden camera and microphone to do their bidding. For that extra wrinkle, Jack's bank is in the middle of a merger, one rife with security concerns.

Firewall plays out like a standard hostage-thriller procedural, even though it baits us with possibilties -- an escape, reverse psychology on the henchmen, biological warfare involving a child allergic to peanuts. You'll have to find out for yourself how those scenarios play out, but when they do, they're at least a welcome diversion, if anything. As with all hostage-thrillers, the hostage(s) change(s) the game at some point, and somebody else ends up on the other end of the gun. The only thing to deduce is when this is going to happen, and will it happen in a way that makes sense. Here it seems to, but with some reservations.

Computer technology is at the core of Firewall, which is Silly Putty in the hands of a screenwriter. The means by which Stanfield enables the theft looks like a hardware hack from the pages of Make magazine. Like writing a computer program to solve a complex problem, screenwriters can fall back on a combination of homebrew software and hardware to fulfill their plot device needs. They willfully invent devices and keyboard commands that exist only in the PC landscape of Hollywood. And audiences don't mind any of this phoniness, including the pen camera than can somehow send a clear signal to a van sitting several stories below with not a hint of fuzz.

The Matrix taught us computer systems are designed around rules which can be bent or broken if need be. Morpheus was right, both in our world and his -- but mostly his.