BEFORE: Liam Hemsworth carries over from "Independence Day: Resurgence", and though this represents the end of my mostly-Hemsworth week, Liam will be back in a couple of weeks when I finally get around to a very big franchise that I've been putting off. So I guess it's sort of like Hemsworth month? I could put those films right after this one, but then the chain wouldn't link to everything I want to get to before the end of the year. You'll see what I mean tomorrow, and then the week after next.
But I got this one to go with "Blackhat", another tech-based thriller, both with Hemsworths starring in them.
THE PLOT: An entry-level employee at a powerful corporation must spy on his boss's old mentor to secure him a multi-billion dollar advantage.
AFTER: White people's problems, am I right? If they're not fighting off the attacking aliens, they're being blackmailed by one smartphone company into spying on another. Maybe I just need another break from movies, and they're starting to all run together.
This is pretty basic corporate espionage stuff here, I guess it's interesting to see the two leads from "Air Force One" face off against each other again as rival heads of the two companies, and former business partners. But which one is the hero here, and which one is the villain? Or do those terms even apply in today's tech-based corporate structure? Do we even have CEO's with morals any more, or did they go away, along with qualified Presidents?
I guess the hero here is supposed to be Liam Hemsworth's character, Adam Cassidy, but he's willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, so he's not really a saint either. They probably added the bit about his father being sick so that he's not really responsible for any corporate malfeasance, he has to do whatever it takes to pay his dad's medical bills after the health insurance went away, and oh, yeah, he's also being blackmailed and his friends are being threatened for good measure, just so there will be no chance of the audience hating this guy. Sure, he can tell himself he's also doing this to get his friends' jobs back, but he's the one that got them fired in the first place, by mouthing off during their pitch meeting.
Look, I don't know anything about the tech world, but is it likely that a guy could try to get ahead with the company's CEO by declaring that management is out of touch with the younger consumer, and that he, and only he, knows the way the kids want to use social media? Doesn't this company run focus groups and surveys or pay a research department to figure this stuff out? If his pitch was based on "only I know that kids want to use Twitter on their big-screen TV" or whatever, it was probably doomed to fail anyway.
But I can believe that the CEO remembers him from the pitch, and sussed out his personality as a guy who will do anything to get ahead. And then a little background check on his financials and his family situation, and there you go, the guy's easily roped in for a little corporate dirty work. But a major, major contrivance with the female lead, with a couple of million young, single women in New York City what happens here by chance just doesn't seem mathematically possible.
And a major NITPICK POINT when the guy who figures out how to turn someone else's phone into surveillance equipment doesn't seem to have any fear of being bugged himself - even though people come flat out and tell him that this is probably what's going on. He should have acted like Gene Hackman in "The Conversation", tearing up the floorboards in his underwear while looking for the hidden microphones.
Also starring Gary Oldman (last seen in "Criminal"), Amber Heard (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Harrison Ford (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "Poseidon"), Lucas Till (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Embeth Davidtz (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Julian McMahon, Josh Holloway (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"), Angela Sarafyan, Will Peltz (last seen in "In Time"), Kevin Kilner, Haley Finnegan, Christine Marzano (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Charlie Hofheimer, Mark Moses.
RATING: 5 out of 10 security guards
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