Mexico City: (2000. dir: Richard Shepard) Not much of a role here for Patrick, although he gets to wear some more excellent suits. He works at the U.S. embassy in the titular city, and looks first like a bad guy, then like a good guy, and finally like a dead guy, without much of anything interesting to do.
This movie is good for one thing: showing you Mexico City. Someone who cares about the place and its history and legacy photographed this, and did it with beauty and grace.
The plot is interesting only because the heroine isn't forced to find a love interest. Her comrade-at-arms in the search to find her desaparecido brother is a friendly cab-driver, married with five kids, and they develop a nice friendship but nothing more. (The only other kind of nice thing is that the priest is a good guy, which would never have happened had it been made in Hollywood with the focus north of the border.)
The script is fatuous and predictable, the exposition hamfisted, the acting decent, the story just interesting enough that you keep watching for the lovely visuals. But just barely.
Firewall: (2006. dir: Richard Loncraine) One of those "cyber-heist" thrillers which are becoming so ridiculously popular these days. This one is actually not terrible. You've got Harrison Ford, Virginia Madsen (as the wife who is an accomplished architect, and yet her career is so laissez-faire that when she and her family are taken hostage for several days, nobody notices. Why? Because she's not really an architect, she's just a wife and mother, apparently with no friends or relations outside her nuclear family. They just wrote the architect thing into the script, I guess to justify the truly gorgeous house right on the Sound in Seattle). There's also Chloe from "24" (who's the best part of that show, am I right?), and Paul Bettany, keeping his usual cool as the Big Bad Pale Brit (and he has a great death moment. Not because it's set up particularly well, totally because of what he does with his face and body. He MAKES that moment out of whole cloth. Well done, sir).
Off to the sides and in the background you have Alan Arkin, Robert Patrick and Robert Forster. Ford's character works as a computer security guy for a bank, and these other fellows are all co-workers, bosses, etc. There's an interesting dynamic in play simply because, when Forster showed up onscreen as Ford's friend and peer, I subconsciously assumed that he would play a role in fixing the bad and creating the inevitable happy ending, just because he's Robert Forster, and it was a kind of shock when he didn't.
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