Dependable Ford covers old ground in 'Firewall'

February 10, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

You're forgiven if the title of the new Harrison-Ford-saves-his-family thriller doesn't exactly get your pulse pounding. As used here, ''Firewall" is an Internet security term, which is like naming an action movie ''Proxy Server!" or ''SOCKS Protocol." It promises not car chases but pale IT technicians staring into banks of computers.

Actually, we get both, since Ford plays Jack Stanfield, a Seattle network security exec who has to rob his own bank via computer if he doesn't want the bad guys to kill his wife (Virginia Madsen) and kids (Carly Schroeder and Jimmy Bennett). As directed by Richard Loncraine (''Richard III," ''Wimbledon"), the movie's competent stuff, but it also represents professionalism in the service of absolutely nothing. Even Ford knows he's been down this road too often; his performance has a grim intensity and not a shred of spontaneity.

A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany (''Master and Commander") as Bill Cox, a pleasant British fellow who pushes into Jack's suburban house one night along with a mixed quartet of young men carrying automatic weapons. Taking the family hostage, they settle in for the long haul, and Bill accompanies Jack to the bank's downtown offices in the morning for the next stage of his plan.

The hero has been wired for sound and video by the high-tech villains; they have remote access to his office PC; he's essentially a hostage with freedom of movement. This makes for suspenseful comedy for a few scenes as Jack behaves like a possessed executive puppet in front of his boss (Alan Arkin), business rival (Robert Patrick, narrowing his ferrety eyes), and secretary (Mary Lynn Rajskub of ''24," once again becoming a cheerfully flaky ally to a Jack in trouble).

At home, meanwhile, the kidnappers are given one personality trait apiece -- there's the thug, the smug, the sweet, and the lunchmeat -- and that's more than Jack's family gets. ''Firewall" cannily plays to the fears of modern parenting with a scene involving a peanut-allergy reaction and a missing EpiPen, and it sets the stakes high with a surveillance camera in each room of the house, but the kids are strictly two-dimensional, and as for Madsen, this is the thanks she gets for her luminous, Oscar-nominated performance in last year's ''Sideways"? As scripted by Joe Forte, the cute/annoying family dog gets to show more personality.