Good concept, poorly executed.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

PLOT SPOILER REVIEW***The film starts out as an excellent thriller/mystery in spite of the lead being Shane West. Shane stars as Max "glass jaw" Peterson a man who installs programs in computers to prevent hackers. Max gets a strange phone that sends him text messages which saves his life and gives him money. We also know the government is after this device and other people have received such a phone and have died from following its instructions. At this point the film is an excellent thriller/mystery.There are few suspects and clues in this production and then we find out who's the culprit and the film becomes boring. Max saves the day from a stunt he saw in "War Games" or if you prefer, the Star Trek episode "The Changeling." At this point I groaned. Perhaps if you have never seen either of those two productions, this might seem pretty darn good. As for me, I got bored when I realized you could kill the "bad guy" by tripping over the plug.Ving Rhames always does a good character job. Outside of that, the film lacked. Might work as a rental. Better than most of the "Red Box" action.PARENTAL GUIDE: F-bombs, no nudity, brief love scene.

So, you just found out that you were supposed to be on a flight that just went down. 120 plus people died. And you just go to the receptionist of the hotel, thanking her for not putting you on that flight. Smiling.Who the F wrote this script? Acting? None. How much did these asses so called "actors" get paid for this crap? The rest of the story? Pure crap.Ending? Whoa! The Russians are the good guys, because they helped the Americans destroy the bull crap they created (N.S.A. computer turned A.I.) Waste of time, folks.

I say this movie is enlightening since it opens the eyes of the viewer to the dangers of mass surveillance (video, computer, cell, etc)On all other points it is completely stupid...1. A computer who can do whatever it wants (supposedly it has some kind of artificial intelligence) and has all the computational power it needs, cannot update itself in secret (noting that the system admin is a complete idiot) and needs to reach to some people through some nice phones, so that it could move to an empty storage house somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in order to make its desired upgrade.2. The main character arrives in Prague, where it gets to a casino and after winning 100000 euros and gaining the attention of the security personnel, it comes back to win the 3000000 euros jackpot... How stupid is that... Like they couldn't see that he was cheating with its phone.3. A sniper and two armed men cannot kill an unsuspecting couple in Prague. Later on, the FBI agents with BMW's have a really hard time keeping up with a Renault Cargo.4. They realize that Echelon does stupid things, but they decide to keep it online and do what it says. 5. In the end, they thought this was not messy enough, so they made agents fight each other.6. The hero saves the day by making the computer find its conscience and notice that it does not keep the rules it needed to keep. So the Intelligent Computer decides that after all this stupid series of events it will shut down and give up, which it does.There are many other lines and scenes which are ridiculous.

Echelon Conspiracy (2009)Wow, this is an exercise in how to make a movie look good and not be good. It seems on the surface to have all these flashy elements, visual and plotwise (conspiracies, snipers, computers with minds of their own, you know the routine). But it's so crappy, to use a sophisticated word, it's painful. It's just badly directed. Yes, the script is lame, yes, the acting is lame. But the direction makes the least of even these elements. Why watch it? Why write a review? It's odd, really, that it can look so good and stumble so badly. If you watch the first minute, you'll be sucked in. If you watch five minutes, you'll see already how clumsy it is.Too bad. Some nice stuff in the wings here.