Firewall (2006)

Firewall arrives from 2006, a year when a studio thriller could still be assembled from parts and shipped to theaters without anyone asking what it was for. Richard Loncraine directs Harrison Ford as Jack Stanfield, chief of security at a Seattle bank, who is coerced into wiring one hundred million dollars to offshore accounts after his family is taken hostage in their own home. The plot involves a camera hidden on a secretary, a cookie laced with nut products, an EpiPen withheld as leverage, and a final confrontation resolved with a pickaxe. It is a machine. The machine works, more or less, and asks nothing of us beyond attention.

The classification work here is mercifully brief. The cast is the standard 2006 studio ensemble, and the women in it occupy the roles such films reserved for them: the endangered wife, the loyal secretary. Race is never raised. No character is marked by sexuality, body, or neurology. The environment goes unmentioned in a film about a bank. The villain wants money for himself, not the redistribution of it, and the institution he plunders is defended to the last reel by a man on its payroll. There is no history to revise because there is no history, only a present tense of keyboards and parking garages.

Most instructive is the absence of sermonizing. The film has no thesis, no lesson, no closing appeal to our better nature. It simply escalates. Critics were unkind, the Rotten Tomatoes figure settling at nineteen percent, and audiences were indifferent enough to leave the worldwide gross just north of eighty million against a fifty million dollar budget. This is a specimen of pure narrative function, a vintage with no additives and no aftertaste. It will not trouble anyone. It will not enlighten anyone. It exists, and then it is over, and the sommelier sets down the glass without a note.

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