Life is generally going well for Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford). He's been running the computer system at his bank for a while now, and it looks like things are on track for the merger to go through, meaning that the small 26-bank operation is about to become part of a much larger company.
The only bad part about that is that it means that he won't be a part of the day-to-day operations any longer. But it does mean that he can slow down and take some time with his family, and no one will be sad about that. It's too bad that some other people have other plans for him - and his family - before this can all go through.
It seems that Bill Cox (Paul Bettany) has decided to make a play for some of the bank's money, and he's targeted Jack in order to get at it. After all, why go directly to the money, when you can go after the man who protects the money instead?
That's a decent plan, and it works out according to the great detail put into it - Cox sets himself up as an alternate buyer for the small regional bank, swooping in at the last moment to save them from the great big bank that they aren't quite sure about. So at the last moment, Jack and his long-time friend have a drink with Cox, and that's the only opening that Cox needs.
For it's on the way out that Cox jumps into the car with Jack and tells him the news that no one wants to hear - it seems that they have captured Jack's family, and they will do something awful if he doesn't help them get what they want. While unspoken, it's obvious that the goal is money, though that doesn't come up right away. So they head home, to find that the family is safe, in the company of the rest of the crew.
That night is spent trying to figure a way out of things, but alas nothing surfaces. The next day, Jack heads into the office and tries to figure a way out, but wouldn't you know it - Cox shows up as a federal bank examiner, and that's when he finds that he missed one part of his planning. It seems that the maintenance terminal for access to the mainframe has been moved from the regional bank to the headquarters half a country away, so the worm that they wanted to plant will no longer work they way that they wanted it to. It's up to Jack to figure out a way to make it work.
This is where things fall apart a bit. Jack creatively takes his daughter's music player and hooks it to a scanner for a fax machine, and hooks that to a terminal, which somehow manages to scan in ten thousand account numbers as they scroll rapidly across the screen - run on the screen via a report when Jack requests it via a voice call. However, if you can make this one leap of faith, it perhaps isn't too bad.
With the account numbers in hand, Jack then has to initiate the transfers to the numbered accounts, and then it's done. Or is it? The movie continues to fall apart, as the would-be criminals implode, killing one another and running to the country, as Jack finds a terminal at the airport and manages, in a few brief keystrokes, operating off of a blurry cell phone camera shot, to replace all the money that was removed.
Then of course he goes out and gets his family back, and that's where the movie ends.
Up until that latter part, it wasn't bad - there was a decent amount of drama and some good build-up, but it just wasn't brought home. There's also the minor fact that the entire bank network was seemingly destroyed by a virus, and I for one am curious about how that was going to be sorted out. I guess we'll never know.
Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of violence, and for some language.
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