I.T. is the kind of predictably “current” cheap thriller that is almost redeemed by its sheer inanity. The premise feels like it was drawn from those Facebook posts that circulate on your relatives’ walls that assume a shouted “keep out!” can stop company employees from stealing your posts. The film attempts to personalize the paranoid threat of social media vulnerability, rendered at such a hysterical pitch that it only works as comedy.
Off the bat, the script betrays a half-understood grasp of contemporary technology and software that hints at problems to come. The protagonist, Mike Regan (Pierce Brosnan), is the owner of an aviation business currently in the process of launching an app for the super-rich to book private planes. Essentially, it’s Über for flying.
This is so outlandishly ridiculous on its face that the film never recovers from the inanity. Anticipation is rife on the markets for the company to go public, but no one seems to worry about its microscopic potential user base, nor the fact that anyone rich enough to book a private plane either has one of their own already or has an assistant who could call and make such an appointment. Regardless, Mike is elated at the prospect of the new venture, and cares nothing about how deeply into debt he will go to pursue it.
A glitch during a presentation brings Mike into contact with Ed Porter (James Frecheville), a preternaturally skilled I.T. guy who saves the day and even comes over to Mike’s house to fix his lagging wi-fi after the boss takes a shine to the kid. Soon, however, Ed begins to act erratically, making explicit overtures toward Mike’s teenage daughter Kaitlyn (Stefanie Scott), eventually lying about her inviting him to come to the house and even to her soccer games.
Ed’s sinister side does not so much escalate as leap from the ground into orbit, from an innocuous introduction straight into unsettling stares and nonchalant dismissal of privacy concerns. The film naturally sets up a story of a working-class weirdo insulted into action by an aloof elite, but no one could find fault with Mike identifying his employee’s dangerous behavior and shutting him out, nor could anyone sympathize with Ed’s swift decision to ruin Mike’s life.
The one-sided moral conflict that erupts between the two thus lacks any compelling reciprocity, or anything to challenge the viewer’s loyalties. Given that Ed freely targets Kaitlyn in a mixture of jealousy and lust, Mike’s willingness to skirt the law to get revenge never reads as a rich man taking advantage of his privilege to get his way. By the same token, Ed is such a Hollywood caricature of a hacker that it’s not easy to hate him; he simply exists as a checklist of traits. The story of an entitled, misogynistic creep taking revenge for imagined harm is topical, but Ed is too transparently evil, lacking a real-life façade of normalcy masking darker impulses.
The film briefly picks up when Mike recruits Henrik (Michael Nyqvist) to help infiltrate Ed’s apartment and gather incriminating evidence, if only because everything involving Henrik comes off as comedy. The two meet in a shot straight out of JFK, with Mike joining Henrik on a bench overlooking the Capitol as they stare straight ahead and softly discuss Mike’s predicament. Later, Henrik, wearing an “inconspicuous” outfit of a trench coat and a bucket hat that would be perfect for snooping circa 1965, monitors Ed in a café as Mike breaks into the apartment, insisting on doing that himself because he is sick of letting others run his life.
Mike’s burst of self-reliant machismo appears to be the film’s core emotional arc, reaffirming the role of the patriarch as a hands-on protector in an era of abstract values. That is admittedly a lot to read into so simple a film, but I.T. celebrates Mike’s fits of physical bravery, finding in them his true worth even as most of his actions make things worse and further provoke Ed. The climactic struggle is oafish in its choreography, which at least has the honesty of what a fight between two keyed-up desk warriors might look like. That their fight is waged in a house that the Regans have roughly stripped of all smart devices completes the film’s subtle proclamation of Luddite self-liberation, best epitomized in a scene where Mike replaces his new, computer-integrated vehicle by ripping the tarp off of a mothballed classic muscle car, a moment played without diegetic sound that tragically deprives us of the chance to hear the man no doubt shouting “Hack this, you bastard.”
The post I.T. appeared first on Spectrum Culture.