I love Harrison Ford. Who doesn’t love Harrison Ford? From Han Solo to Blade Runner to Indiana Jones to Jack Ryan in those Tom Clancy adaptations (Clear and Present Danger was my favorite), Harrison Ford has been a movie staple for 30 years. And although his performance in Firewall was sufficient, I think it might be time to pass the action hero baton to someone in the younger generation.

The premise of Firewall is simple. Jack Stanfield is the head of security at a small regional bank. He’s a family man and a good guy. He becomes the target of a group of bank robbers, led by bad British guy Bill Cox (Paul Bettany) who plan on using Jack’s knowledge of and access to the bank’s computer systems to rob it. As leverage, they take Jack’s wife Beth (Virginia Madsen) and two children, 15-year old Sarah (Carly Schroeder) and 9-year old Andrew (Jimmy Bennett) hostage.

Even though Ford looked more like he was protecting his daughter and grandchildren than his wife and children, that wasn’t the problem for Firewall. Ford carries a movie like few other actors and after a while, I was able to buy him in that role. As Bill Cox, Paul Bettany provides a perfect foil to Ford’s moral and family-centered Jack. Greed is Bill’s sole motivator and he possesses a chilling indifference to Jack’s family and their ultimate fate.

The first problem with Firewall is that no one (not in my audience, anyway) quite believed in the elaborate contraption of a plan that Jack has to pull off to steal the money (it involved everything from iPods and laptops to fax machine parts and good old fashion scotch tape). The second problem, which applies to computer-based heist movies in general, is that the very nature of them makes it hard to build tension. Watching someone type code feverishly into a PC or talk about how ingenious their plan is to make the ‘mainframe remotely interface with the whatsimajig’ just isn’t exciting.

Towards the end, when the movie shifts from ‘heist’ movie to ‘frame an innocent man’ movie things pick up. It at least gets a little bit interesting before ending as predictably as it started.

I can’t help but think what good actors like Ford, Bettany and Madsen could have done with a thriller that actually thrills.