Unbelievably stupid movies have always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not because idiocy isn't rampant, in Hollywood as everywhere else—that part makes sense. But feature films take so long to gestate, and are labored upon by so many at least nominally intelligent professionals, that it's kind of astonishing how much unadulterated nonsense still makes it to the screen. It's as if you spent four hours getting dressed in the morning, assisted by a team of half a dozen grooms and valets, and then still showed up at work with mismatched socks and your shirt buttons in the wrong holes. There's really nothing wrong with Firewall, a new thriller starring Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany, that couldn't be fixed with a quick, efficient rewrite; its implausibilities and contrivances are so glaring that they inspired bursts of derisive laughter at the screening I attended. And yet nobody who worked on the picture apparently thought to ask any of the numerous basic hey-wait-a-minute questions that practically leap out and clonk the viewer on the head.
Granted, one of those questions—isn't Harrison Ford getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing?—has a comprehensible answer rooted in stasis and inertia: Hollywood has too few established action stars to send the older ones out to pasture, and Ford, who famously turned down the Michael Douglas role in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, may be the most risk-averse actor in Hollywood. So I'm prepared to overlook his bizarrely dyspeptic performance as Jack Stanfield, a computer-security honcho in charge of protecting the mostly digital assets of a large Seattle bank. Nor can I come down too hard on Bettany, who's given remarkably little to do as Cox, the urbane criminal mastermind who kidnaps Stanfield's family (wife Virginia Madsen, cashing in on her Sideways triumph, plus two kids) and uses their lives as leverage to force our grumpy hero into helping him make off with $100 million in ones and zeros. Mediocrity isn't the issue here. Incompetence is.
Part of the problem is that first-time screenwriter Joe Forte—potentially ironic name!—keeps squandering terrific ideas. Early on, Cox and his team of college-age computer geeks send Stanfield to the bank, having first fitted him with a surveillance camera in the form of a fountain pen placed in his shirt pocket, plus a separate microphone. Stanfield manages to transfer the camera-pen to his secretary without their knowledge, sits her down in his office chair, then goes for help—but must now improvise an "audio track" that conforms to the image his abductors are monitoring. Great opportunity for a display of ingenuity under pressure, right? But the sequence is over before it even begins; you can almost hear the audience's expectations deflate: Pfffft. A bit later, Cox impulsively orders Stanfield to fire the secretary without cause. Did I mention that she's played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, who's spent the last two years honing television's most mesmerizing neurotic on 24? The writers on that show, working on tight weekly deadlines, could wring at least 15 pulse-pounding minutes from the notion of bad guys forcing Jack Bauer to shitcan Chloe. Forte had months, if not years, at his disposal, and the best he could manage is some undifferentiated sputtering and a climactic "Screw you!"
What's truly galling and mystifying, though, is the stuff that just makes no damn sense. Some instances are relatively minor: One character owns what is apparently the only answering machine in the world that plays back new messages in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent. (We have to hear that one first, otherwise we don't even know whose house we're in.) Others, though, are pretty fundamental—it's hard to believe that nobody who read the script ever cleared his/her throat uncomfortably and summoned the courage to ask, "Um, why are the wife and kids still even alive at this point for our hero to try to save? And why the hell would the criminals take the dog along?" By the time a GPS tracking device on the pooch's collar turns into a plot device, it's apparent that the collective perspicacity of the folks who made Firewall can't match that of the average 8-year-old. They've built their own defensive firewall—one that basic logic can't penetrate.