Takedown Taken Down
by Emmanuel Goldstein
As a race, we must always redefine our boundaries. That which was impossible in the past becomes attainable and even commonplace in the future. The boundaries of tolerance have been in constant movement since the beginning of recorded history. Indeed, even the boundaries of space itself - the very edge of the universe - have not remained constant.
Takedown is a movie that redraws the boundary of bad. To critics and movie buffs, this will be an inconvenience, as long established champions of bad cinema such as Plan 9 From Outer Space or Waterworld may lose their spot in history to this relative newcomer.
At 2600, we had to go to a bit of trouble to actually see this film. Since it's already been released in various countries around the world, it's now possible to see a video or DVD copy if you order it from one of these places. (It's still a no-show in the United States and after finally seeing it I can understand why.) We got ours from France - via www.amazon.fr - where the film goes by the name of Cybertraque. Note that you will need a DVD player that can get around the region-locking nonsense that makes it a pain in the ass to view foreign movies. The irony here is that this is an American film which most Americans are technically unable to view. Not that very many would want to, but the choice should be theirs.
You see, none of us wanted it to come to this. We tried to stop this grossly inaccurate and unfair portrayal of the Kevin Mitnick story as soon as we found out about it back in 1998. It was based on an equally distorted and biased book of the same name written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura way back in 1995, the year Mitnick was arrested. And when we saw the script, we knew something had to be done. I mean, they portrayed this guy as a violent racist criminal who went through life cheating and stealing. The one infamous scene we objected to had Mitnick ambushing Shimomura in a dark alleyway in Seattle where he then clubbed him on the head with a garbage can lid. (That scene was later removed.)
We tried everything to reach the folks at Miramax - phone calls, visits, even a demonstration outside their New York offices. We never got a response. Even when we visited the set in North Carolina, they wound up literally running away from us. They never believed that all we wanted to do was ensure that the story be told accurately since the guy they were portraying was stuck in prison unable to defend himself. They probably believed that everyone in the hacker community exists simply to create mayhem. Reports that filtered down to us confirmed a high level of paranoia on the set.
So it's little wonder that the film sucks, that foreign audiences worldwide have united in their rejection of it, and that it may never get released in this country. Bad storytelling has a way of not working out.
The DVD we received also contained a real-life Kevin Mitnick interview, something that surprised Mitnick quite a bit since he had never given permission for it to be included! The attaching of the real-life Mitnick's image to this product falsely implies that he endorsed its release. He most certainly did not.
From the opening moments, Takedown misses the boat on hackers in general and Mitnick in particular. TV images reveal the threat and fear of hackers, who engage in widespread information distribution known as "hacker communism." It gets worse. When Kevin and his friend Alex go to meet sleazy hacker "Icebreaker" (based on real-life hacker Agent Steal), it's in a strip bar. "You set up this meeting," Kevin (played by Skeet Ulrich) says disparagingly to the soon to be revealed federal informant. As if hackers operate by setting up meetings in the style of underworld crime figures.
"This is where you get into trouble," Alex (played by Donal Logue) warns Kevin when he tries to find out more information about some computer system somewhere. But Kevin is right there with an even blander response: "I just have to know." Said with all the passion of a manatee.
Passion is just one of the qualities lacking in Takedown, where you're left with the overriding question: Why should I care what happens to any of these people? There are only two characters I liked in the film and both of them were minor roles - the two techies from Cellular One. Maybe they just seemed like the only human beings in a film of stick figures. I don't think I've ever seen a larger assortment of sulky, sullen, spoiled brats in a single production.
When Alex goes to meet Kevin in a dark alley while he's eluding the feds, he utters what is likely the most prophetic line of this 90 minute ordeal: "Aren't you taking this cloak and dagger shit a little far?" I changed my mind - I like Alex too. Because I know deep down he was aiming that line at the director.
Takedown never seems to synch into an actual plot - at first it's about Kevin's attempts to learn about a phone service that allows any phone to be listened in on. Then it's about a fictitious phone company called Nokitel and the obtaining/cracking of their source code. Then it's Kevin vs. Tsutomu for no particular reason other than Tsutomu calling him "lame." The ultimate insult. Then it's Kevin running from the FBI and becoming the Bionic Hacker as he leaps over fences in slow motion. And, naturally, in the end it's about a virus called Contempt that apparently can do everything from crashing planes to stealing money. Kevin has to enlist the help of 10,000 university computers to "crack the code" because he just "has to know." All the while the FBI is stumbling over themselves to track him down while Tsutomu sneers in the background at their incompetence.
Apart from the amazing ability to make his face appear on the screens of computers that he's hacking, Takedown's Mitnick has no special skills. He's just a nasty person who treats women like crap - he refers to his own mother as a bitch and tries to seduce a big-toothed potential girlfriend into the world of scanning when all she wanted was sex. These little character traits of his were completely fabricated. They only show how the writers didn't care at all about the real Mitnick whose integrity they were destroying.
And don't get me started on the technical stupidity. Who the hell had flat screen monitors in 1994? And why does Mitnick seem surprised that a payphone call costs 35 cents? (He quickly solves that problem by holding up a tone dialer to the phone and... dialing Touch-Tones! How could anyone dare to call him lame?) I don't know what they were trying to imply when an FBI agent was reading a headline and it literally took ten seconds for it to scroll by! And why in God's name does Shimomura refer to an overheard phone call of Mitnick's as a modem call when it's quite obviously to a fax machine?!
But the biggest gaffe of all lies in something that was apparently edited out. All throughout the film, the main FBI guy (aptly named Gibson) is walking around with a huge unlit cigar in his mouth - even when he's standing in his house after Mitnick turns off his water, gas, and electric from a payphone. It never seems to leave his mouth. Yeah, it's gross and disgusting, but what the hell is the point? Well, in the script, we realize that this guy only lights the cigar after he captures the criminal. So guess what scene these geniuses decided to cut? This seems to have been patched together with all the care of the people who fill potholes in New York.
But don't take my word for it. Read the profundities of Takedown in its own words from various scenes:
"Privacy? Never heard of it."
"This is like no kind of code I've seen before."
"I'm a hacker. Mitnick's a cracker. Big difference."
"When you thought you were talking to Netcom, you were talking to me.
You were the machine?
Yes, I was.""You did not get this from me. I do not want Kevin Mitnick coming after me."
"He said I was lame!
Kevin, he didn't know it was you.""The question is how. The question is always how."
In my opinion, the question is why.
This travesty could have been prevented if only a dialogue had been established. Instead we have a film that actually makes region coding seem like a good idea.