Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a pretty unhappy review of Harrison Ford's newest, FIREWALL. I really hope Ford wakes up and shakes off the sluggish state he's been in for about 10 years. Maybe he'll pull a Frosty and he'll come alive when that magic hat is placed on his head... in this case a fedora and not a tophat. I certainly hope so. Here's the review!
They showed Firewall last Monday here in Boston and I noticed that you hadn't run a review of it yet. Maybe that's because just taking in the trailer,the poster, the taglines and the February release date is enough to let anyone know that Firewall goes hand-in-hand with mediocrity. That's certainly what I expected as a I sat down to watch it and might not even have done that if the theater hadn't promised a Q&A with Harrison Ford after the film.
I wish I could say that the film somehow didn't disappoint. I wish I could say that there was something original and intelligent about the script. Most of all, I wish I could say that at least Harrison Ford, my favorite actor since childhood, was good in it.
But I honestly can't think of a single good thing to say about Firewall.
The entire film plays like a third-rate Ransom and consistently backs down from moments that could play out more effectively so that it can, one assumes, maintain a PG-13 rating. There's a scene where Harrison Ford, refusing to cooperate with criminals who hold hold his family hostage, has his son brought up by Paul Bettany who orders one of his men to break the child's knee. Ford immediately begs him not to and he immediately recinds the threat. Instead, the only proof we have of Bettany's evil ways is when he shoots and kills his own men and (I'm not making this up) sits down and watches the Flintstones with the son (allergic to peanuts) only to fake-kindly offer him a cookie with (gasp!) peanuts in it.
It just gets hard to care.
The whole plot plays out like this. By the time the film is done we learn that Bettany's such a bad guy that he would have killed Harrison Ford's family regardless of what happened and, while we can look to any other hostage film and know that this was coming, in the world of the film it's hard to understand any reason that Ford's character shouldn't go along with villians and just do as they say. It's clearly stated that the money being stolen is being taken from the faceless "100 richest people" who use the banking system Ford works for and in increments small enough that it's simply not a matter of life and death.
Then there's levels of stupidity added to the plot that really hurt the film. There's a scene where Bettany (just 'cause he's crazy) orders Harrison Ford to fire a woman that works as his secretary in the middle of a bank robbery. We're meant to feel the high-concept type of awkwardness that Phone Booth and Joyride use, but in this case it just doesn't make sense. Forcing someone to act out of character might be fun for the audience to watch, but all it does it draw suspicion during a time when Bettany needs that the least.
It's bad enough to see Harrison Ford borrow his daughter's I-Pod and turn it into a bank-robbing computer, but one of the first scenes in the film establishes that Ford's son has a remote control car that disrupts video signals. Wonder if that'll come into play in battling the high-tech thiefs who use video cameras to take over Ford's life? (It does.)
The direction is also strictly mediocre and the one attempt at style (involving cutting between the violent scenes of the family being kidnapped and a solemn office meeting) comes off as laughable and as if they film is mocking itself. Likewise, the script seems to have taken a cue from Air Force One and gives Harrison Ford terrible one-liners that he says in an angry voice so the climax of most action scenes is simply Firewall shouting "Get off my plane!"
It's not that Harrison Ford is doing a bad job, given this film, but it's certainly not a good performance. I got the feeling from his Q and A that he knows it, too as he made a comment about some films just being a career to him.
Outside of Firewall, he didn't say a whole lot of interest. He said he hopes that Indiana Jones starts soon ("Hopefully this summer" were his exact words) and that he has more projects lined up for the future than he's had in quite a while.
Let's hope they're better than Firewall.
