(Say Guys, Where's the "Return" Key?)

"Thriller" Not Fit As A TV Movie

Knowing that "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" are on his resume, one is left dumbfounded what Harrison Ford's agent is doing involving him in "Firewall", a movie so bad it barely made it to the screens after even the studio tried to pull the plug.

Openly admitting that he has no interest in computers, Harrison Ford playsd Jack Stansfield (we know he must be the hero as they always seem to be called Jack) who is a systems executive for a financial institution where he sits glaring open-eyed at his terminal like a caveman given a Walkman. Opposite him is Paul Bettany, an actor who is rapidly becoming the hallmark of celluloid trash, as Bill Cox, the typical bad guy who is, as usual, English. In a plot as boring as a bank statement, Cox kidnaps Stansfield's family with whom Jack has eerily no chemistry whatsoever in order to force him to hack his own company's systems. Why he didn't see this coming is baffling as Hollywood has shown us time after time that it is only families with a son that has a chronic health problem that are even menaced.

In the "Director's Interview", Richard Loncraine let slip that as they were shooting it, they had noa idea how they were going to write it, so talentless had been the cruddy script of the oxymoronically named Joe Forte. As this tosh stumbles on with the audience having more idea of where it is going from having seen this same old dull story a dozenfold before, it closely ressembles the very worst of TV moves not only due to lousy acting, but also hampered by a crew of the severely linguistically-challenged and the resulting dull cinematography of Marco Pontecorvo from Italy and the choppy, tinny music of Frenchman Alexandre Desplat.

By the time Harrison Ford is thrown through an obviously phoney wall at the inevitable deserted cottage by the lake as the "big stunt" in "big scene", we are left with the obvious question, "Just why are we waatching this film?"

Film Critic:Robert L Thompsett

(Ford makes a bid to escape this wreck of a movie)