A film so obscure now that I had to make my own screen grab of the title card. The only image I could find on the web was the ‘sexy’ one below - you can’t say we don’t give you the full nine yards here at the 100 W Movies Quest!
The film’s low profile is down to it being a TV movie and an awful one at that, but let’s check out that plot before slagging it off.
We open with a girl running through a city with her headphones on. She’s dressed in a hoodie so we don’t know if she’s a jogger or a mugger but she serves to give us some nice city shots which no doubt pleased the Montreal Tourist Board. The girl turns out to be our heroine, Abby, who on arriving at her apartment is surprised by an uninvited guest. It turns out to be a sexy surprise as it is her unreliable boyfriend, Josh.
The pair have some of that movie sex where they are wrapped in the sheets tighter than a pair of mummies before falling asleep. All is not well however as Josh uses the post coital lull to access Abby’s laptop and upload a programme. He leaves the next morning but is seemingly blown up in his car - I say 'seemingly' as the budget only stretched to having some flammable jelly set alight on the bonnet.
Being a trouper Abby returns to her work as a computer programmer for a security firm and manages to do a ‘hacking for thickies’ demonstration for some investors and indeed the slow witted viewers who have stayed on board this long. Her boss congratulates her on a job well done but her triumph is short lived when two FBI agents arrive to advise that Josh is a notorious hacker who seduces lady programmers to get into their systems and presumably, their pants.
Abby is worried that her kick ass programme may have been compromised and soon finds she has been set up in an account with $10 millions. Rather than run off with the cash she starts a long quest to figure out who she can trust and how she can restore her reputation. You see ‘Web of Lies’ is a clever title - it’s a pun on the internet or something!
This was a real effort of a film to watch with acting that would make a soap opera blush. It looked more like a film school effort than TV movie with some of the actors nothing of the kind. The comic relief assistant and the excitable boss were dreadful but the lady FBI agent topped the lot with her complex and variously motivated character a mystery to all, including the viewer.
The film did have a few surprises, but so does a bad curry and some of the computer wizardry was patently ridiculous to anyone whose ever waited five minutes for Firefox too boot up. There was a decent stab at reassessing what had gone before with previously related events replayed in monochrome from a different character’s perspective to make you second guess the plot, but it didn’t work and seemed gimmicky at best.
The big scam which was original to anyone who’s never seen ‘Superman 3’ or ‘Office Space’ or basically any film involving computers was the old ‘fractions of pennies being shaved off’ routine but at least it did try to evolve beyond this. Sadly the expanded scam was basically stealing cash using a laptop, although efforts to clue the thickies in with demos involving coasters and sugar packets were used to muddy the waters somewhat.
You won’t know any of the leads and won’t remember them after this either. The actress playing Abby was a poor man’s Scarlett Johansson and she was offered no support from a feeble douche with floppy hair. If you are into watching films with a detached sense of irony ‘Web of Lies’ may do it for you, but for anyone who values each 90 minutes of their lives it’s definitely best avoided.
Best Bit : Hello Heads of Computer Conglomerates - this is a computer - Duh!
W Score 5/23
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