Review of Takedown

Takedown (2000)
6/10
"Track Down": Seedy Story of a Misguided Mind
31 January 2016
From thequickflickcritic.blogspot.com/

"Adapted from a true story" flashes upon the screen as we are ushered into "Track Down" and our introduction to super cyber security system hacker and convicted felon Kevin Mitnick (Skeet Ulrich in a fine and frenzied performance). And what a messed up megalomaniacal miscreant we will come to know. "Truly".

"Track Down" takes us along on a swiftly paced cat and mouse game Mitnick launches versus the feds and fellow hackers during the 1990's. And by all evidence furnished by Director Joe Chappelle (TV's "The Wire", "CSI: Miami"), entirely and simply because he could.

The extreme lengths that Mitnick goes to perch himself atop a kind of self-fashioned "hierarchy of hackers" absolutely astounds. It is practically unfathomable to imagine what this "gangstuh geek" may have accomplished had he been of clear mind and even HALF a heart.

Mitnick is vividly depicted here as unconditionally brilliant. And while certainly proving to be explosively bright, this is a miserably sad fellow who is emotionally busted to bits. Mitnick reveals to us in pieces a wretched upbringing which has continued to torture him into an angry and malicious adulthood.

Here is just one striking example of how SERIOUSLY screwy this dude is. Mitnick has a character played by the paralyzingly gorgeous Amanda Peet all to himself on a couch in her apartment following an evening date. And SHE is even making the FIRST MOVE. It is at this pivotal point in the proceedings that Mitnick actually asks this vision in voluptuousness, even as she is wholesale submitting her most ample charms to him, if she knows how to SCAN? It's enough to make a guy wanna reach into the scene and whack the weirdo over the head with an iPad!

Looking at computer screens crawling with programming code and dry eraser boards scrawling with indecipherable mathematical equations is not inherently entertaining. However, human beings desperately wrestling with such daunting data and the havoc it can wreak CAN prove to be compelling. And so is the case with "Track Down".

Still, in the end, the reality is that what we are left with is the sordid story of a brazen and bitter man who proved to be nothing more than a viciously vindictive terrorist thug.

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