FLAMEOUT

REVIEWED - FIREWALL: WE HAVE, over the last decade or so, become used to the notion of Harrison Ford taking jobs - detective, pilot, submarine captain, president of the United States - for which he is clearly too old. Strangely, none of those arduous positions suited Mr Ford, now 63, less comfortably than the sedentary post he takes up in this hysterically dreadful techo-thriller from the director of Wimbledon and Slade in Flame, writes Donald Clarke

Ford plays the computer-savvy head of security for a major bank. He wallops his keyboard furiously. He spouts endless mouthfuls of technical jargon. Forced into betraying his employers when evil Paul Bettany kidnaps his family, he uses an iPod, bits of a fax machine and some sticky-back paper to fashion a device capable of extracting account details from a mainframe computer. All the while the poor man wears the desperate look of an older father - a rare night alone without his teenage children, perhaps - failing hopelessly to programme his video recorder. What next? Ford the snowboarder?

Whatever. No actor, however young, could have salvaged this brainless farrago of worn cliches and logical convulsions. Bettany is, as always, watchable as the slimy villain whose gang bursts into Ford's lakeside house with larcenous intentions. Nothing much else works.

Much of the supposed action involves the characters staring at a computer screen while a grey bar seeks to fill itself up before something-or-other happens. When the hostages fail to come up with any more ingenious way of engineering escape, one of them simply bashes a captor over the head with a kitchen blender. How do these scripts ever make it into production?

Still, we should be thankful that Ford has allowed the producers to hire an actress (Virginia Madsen) just young enough to be his daughter to play his wife, rather than one young enough to be his granddaughter. Perhaps Hilary Duff was busy.