Firewall

(Herald rating: * * )

The main failure of this Harrison Ford thriller isn't its lack of originality - its plot is creakier than its leading man and he's as solid and bruised as ever playing a hard-working father-of-two bank IT guy who is trying to defend his family.

Nor is it its "Computer Heists and Identity Theft for Dummies" of a plot, which has been faked better in slightly worse films like Swordfish or The Net.

No, it's where it all ends up. Without trying to spoil the ending, Firewall's big finish involves - in no particular order - the family dog, an unbreakable glass coffee-pot, a pickaxe, an exploding car and a semi-renovated house by the lake where the windows are conveniently covered in plastic and not glass.

The combination of these does not a fitting end to a thinking person's cyber-thriller make. Instead, it just tends to undo all the suspension of disbelief you invested earlier to try to enjoy the damn thing.

Still, it does the what-would-an-ordinary-man-do? stuff fairly well for the first half, with Ford playing a Seattle bank's IT security guy whose family is kidnapped by Bettany's gang of geeks to force him to help them cause most of the Pacific Northwest to rack up a $100 million overdraft.

But the convolutions and coincidences pile up, as do the shots of Ford looking harried at his keyboard.

As the villain Bettany, while effectively evil, doesn't have enough good lines to become the new Alan Rickman, while Madsen's role as wife and mother is as one-dimensional as her kidnappers.

It might be about stealing virtual millions, identity theft and kidnapping, but for a movie which spends this much time in a bank, it's sure low on pay-off.

CAST: Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen
DIRECTOR: Richard Loncraine
RATING: M (violence, offensive language)
RUNNING TIME: 104 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas from Thursday