By Preston Wilder
Older people have a problem with computers. That, in a nutshell, is the fear being exploited by I.T., a clichéd and ridiculous thriller in which a wealthy CEO played by Pierce Brosnan (an older person, who also produced the movie) antagonises his I.T. guy and just about lives to regret it. The techie (James Frecheville) is young and savvy; Pierce can’t even work the espresso machine, let alone the Internet of Things at his ‘smart’ mansion where everything’s connected. Pierce the actor is regal, though. He should be playing kings and emperors, and he knows it too: you can see the conscious pose when the CEO sits in his private plane, looking out the window with a world-weary, lion-in-winter expression. At 63, Brosnan has matured into a fine specimen of Homo Patriarchus, the manly middle-aged male.
Anna Friel is his wife, who doesn’t get much to do (her most typical scene comes when things fall apart and she asks Pierce to “fix it”). Stefanie Scott is his teenage daughter, who starts all the trouble by (a) being hot, and (b) texting James while her parents are having a dinner party and begging him to “Save me”. He, being an awkward type living in a geek-cave full of giant screens, duly arrives at the mansion only to be turned away – and is so displeased that he goes into meltdown mode, playing a song in the car on the way home (actually ‘Words’ by Missing People) and singing along with a furious expression! If that isn’t the mark of a dangerous psycho, I don’t know what is.
Things were going fine until then, indeed creepy James was starting to believe that he and Pierce were friends – though it’s pretty obvious that his regal boss views him mostly as the hired help, especially given Pierce’s disdain for all things internet. “I don’t think it’s making anybody’s life better,” he opines, speaking of the new high-tech culture where privacy is a thing of the past (James used to work for the NSA, mass surveillance being another fear that’s exploited by the movie). “Guess it depends what your life was like to begin with,” replies the techie, accidentally exposing the snobbish attitude at the heart of I.T. – viz. that the internet is empowering low-class plebs who don’t deserve beautiful mansions, and would surely know their place in a world run by Brosnans.
James isn’t given a chance, of course (admittedly he’s a bit strange, and too old for Stefanie), and he soon becomes a problem. Pierce is compelled to fire him – at which point the cliché of the Hidden Psycho explodes full force. If you thought singing along in the car was bad, wait till you see James’ reaction to being let go, which involves stripping naked in his geek-cave (?), lifting weights (??) and taking a puff on an oxygen mask (???), all to the accompaniment of flashing lights and doomy music. His revenge is terrible, though actually not that terrible. Taking over our hero’s home internet, he turns on the lawn sprinklers at night and wakes up the family with running taps and loud noises (meanwhile he’s back in the geek-cave, laughing evilly and knocking back smoothies). He also hacks into Pierce’s company and sends Anna a fake email about her mammogram results, giving her a scare before she calls the doctor and confirms that the email was fake. You’d think a decent hacker would be able to fake the results themselves, but let’s not go there.
The cherry on the cake is soporific Michael Nyqvist as a rival hacker hired by Pierce to fight back, who decides that the problem is the smart house. “We make the house dumb!” he suggests – a perfect rallying-cry for a movie that seems to have been consciously ‘made dumb’ after a merely mediocre first hour. The final act of I.T. is irredeemable, all shoddy plotting and unanswered questions. Does anyone – let alone a millionaire CEO – face the cops without a lawyer? Does anyone simply hand them illegally-obtained evidence and ask them to sort it out? Don’t the filmmakers have anything better to offer than Pierce going nuts (“I’ll tear him to pieces!”) and the hacker turning home invader in time for the unconvincing climax?
I.T. is straight-to-DVD fare, with wafer-thin performances and consistently over-emphatic direction by John Moore, who made the Omen remake (his stylistic contribution seems to be shooting the fights in extreme close-up, all skin and saliva). It’s Brosnan’s second misfire as producer-star, after last year’s How to Make Love Like an Englishman – yet his presence in a film remains attractive, a burnished authoritative presence, like George Clooney with a touch more steel. It’s fun to see him rolling up his sleeves to address a corporate meeting, or proclaiming “I own this company!”, or leaving the theatre with his wife and admitting that the play was beyond him – though what he actually says in that scene is embarrassingly relevant to this shoddy B-movie: “I want my two hours back!”.
DIRECTED BY John Moore
STARRING Pierce Brosnan, James Frecheville, Anna Friel
US 2016 95 mins
