Someone
should warn Mike Regan the women you meet through online chats sometimes turn
out to be men. The corporate jet magnate just isn’t very computer savvy. He is
about to reveal his smart home passwords to his company’s new systems temp. In
doing so, he will learn a perennial management lesson. Good help is definitely hard
to find in John Moore’s I.T. (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Regan
is about to take his firm public to raise capital for his uber-for-private-jets
app. Rather embarrassingly his launch event is nearly sabotaged by technical
glitches, but Ed Porter, the new socially awkward temp saves the day. Impressed
by his resourcefulness and full of his own fake egalitarianism, Regan invites
him over to the house to speed up the wifi and do other computer stuff. At this
point, he should be writing his own ticket to full time employment and quick promotion,
but his horrendous misunderstanding of boundaries ruins all his good credit.
Since he continues to do creepy stuff, like showing up to cheer on the Regan’s prep
school daughter in her field hockey game, his almost-mentor cans him. Feeling
betrayed, Porter uses all his backdoors and Trojans to makes the Regans’ lives
absolutely miserable.
For
about ten minutes, I.T. gets smart
when Michael Nyqvist blows into town as Henrik, the mysterious “cleaner,” who specializes
in shutting down cyber menaces like Porter. Unfortunately, it soon reverts back
to its previous dumb self. When it comes to stupidity in Don Kay & William
Wisher’s screenplay, nobody can touch the moronic cops, who bizarrely identify
immediately with the twitchy computer nerd rather than the wealthy airplane
dude. At one point, Regan’s real I.T. department suggests Porter might be able
to crash their planes out of the sky, but they never follow up on this
potentially catastrophic plot point.
As
Regan, Pierce Brosnan sort of plays his age without giving up on playing good
guy-leading mean. Nyqvist is slyly droll as the Cleaner, while James Frecheville
does some of his best work yet (certainly compared to Adore and Animal Kingdom,
in which everyone else just overwhelmed him) as the staggeringly inappropriate
Porter. However, they are just working with a screenplay that is dumber than a
bag full of hammers.