Reasonably entertaining but unexceptional thriller starring Harrison Ford as bank IT security expert Jack Stanfield, who is kidnapped by a criminal gang led by Paul Bettany. The family are taken hostage and Stanfield is asked to hack into his own IT system to transfer $100 million.
The two leads are fairly strong and clichés are mostly avoided, but the film doesn’t quite come alive until the action finally kicks off. The wife (Virginia Madsen) and children are underdeveloped as characters, making their predicament less troubling than it should be. You struggle to believe they are real people in real peril. Likewise, the techie henchmen seem one-dimensional. You know they won’t last long, and they don’t. Far more enthralling is the loyal secretary, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, whose facial expressions communicate so much. Harrison Ford is reliably watchable and does everything he can with the material, but even he can’t make wandering around an office or a server room seem interesting.
The title seems to have been chosen because, circa 2006, it still had a faint whiff of futuristic glamour about it. In 2020, it’s as quaint as calling the film Download or Software Update.
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