Firewall

This Harrison Ford vehicle actually works for its first three quarters before losing its way with a routine “heroic Ford” finale. The scowling one plays Jack, a security specialist with access to a major bank’s computers. A true scumbag of a man (Paul Bettany, in a nice villainous turn) kidnaps Jack’s wife (Virginia Madsen) and children, threatening to kill them if Jack doesn’t transfer lots of funds to his account. The film looks like the same-old, same-old for Ford on the surface, but a good majority of it requires his best acting since What Lies Beneath. Things go haywire when Jack goes Johnny Rambo on the bad guys, dispatching villains with an efficiency not normally found in your average computer programmer. It’s almost worth seeing for the interplay between Bettany and Ford, but it’s a lost cause in the end. Too bad, because Ford needs a good one.