W3Y'st'd Days

Thursday, April 08, 2004

review: the recruit

Originally, I hadn't planned on staying, but it just happened that I sat down with them. They rented 2 movies: the Mothman and the Recruit. It was almost a unanimous vote for the Recruit.

My main complaint with the Recruit is on the technical side. Whenever I see a moview about "hacking", viruses, or anything remotely computer related; I can't help but rate the accuracy of the technical aspects. When a movie is no longer believable in that way, I tend to lose interest. Credibility is especially important in a movie of this type because it is trying to establish that everything is "real". If the technical side isn't credible, how can anything else be?

The first issue I had was Collin Farrel's little app that hijacked video signals. It would be one thing if the video signals were transmitted wirelessly, but most video signals are closed circuit, making them difficult to impossible to hack into unless you are directly on the line. But I let this go and just assumed that the video stream was being transmitted wirelessly.

The second issue was that Collin Farrel was presenting encryption software to Dell. As far as I know, Dell makes personal and business computers. They don't develope any of their own software, unless it's drivers for their hardware. Encryption is an entire industry to itself and to see Dell splinter off and do something like this is just highly unbelievable.

The third issue came up when they were talking about Ice 9, a virus that propogates through electrical lines. First off, how would the virus jump from the operating system into the computer's power supply, run down the electrical line, jump into another power suppy, and make it into another computer's operating system? Not only does the virus ignore the fact that most critical systems exist on Unix platforms but it ignores that most viruses only attack windows systems.

This wouldn't be such a big deal were it not such a huge plot device. The tension that the movie tries to create is based on establishing hat this virus is a huge threat to all existing infrastructure. With the virus being impotent, it doesn't really matter any longer what the characters are doing.

Granted, there's an aspect of playing to the audience, but I think most audiences are smart enough to realize just how dumb certain things are. They may not see it at first, but when they think about it, they know that it can't be true.

Other than the technical flaws, the movie wasn't that bad. It's not great by any means, but it is entertaining.

There are a good number of twists in the story, but none of them are really that shocking when they come around. The first 75% of the movie is pretty predicatable and nothing really comes as a surprise. The bigger twists at the end are surprising, but they don't really cast much doubt or tension onto the plot. You tend to just accept that the new twist is true and move on. Good thrillers throw in twists and keep you guessing. Is the new information valid? Is it credible? You don't get that in the Recruit.

The acting is alright. Al Pacino seems like he's just in it for the paycheck. He's a great actor, but now, he's gotten to the point where he's too famous for his own good. You no longer see whatever character he's playing, but you see him instead. This isn't true with his older films, such as Godfather 1+2, Scarface, and others.

Collin Farrel, again, plays a smart, kind of angry character. Nothing too inspiring. It seems like he was cast more for his looks than for his acting chops. This isn't to say that he's terrible, but any face that can read lines would do.

The other actors were minor and forgettable.

Overall, the movie was fun. Even though Howie had told me the ending already, it didn't really make that big of a difference. The parts that had to have tension did, to an extent. But this isn't one of those movies that you would want to run out and see. It's more of, if it's on, I wouldn't mind watching it.

2.5/5