Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

You know what has to suck? You’re making this movie which is about technology and stuff, centered around some kind of computer gone wild arbitrarily making decisions, and you have this handsome young star of admittedly marginal talent as your lead. You probably figure that action, a couple of solid name actors and a really slick look should get you over. Damn if right down the street somebody is making a similar movie also starring a handsome young star of marginal talent, a movie that also has some name talent to support this star and is also brimming to the rim with action sequences. That sucks man. What sucks even worse is that that film which has called itself ‘Eagle Eye’ kicks the stuffing out your movie with the sucky factor further compounded by the fact that ‘Eagle Eye’ really wasn’t all that good. This is what ‘The Echelon Conspiracy’ has had to deal with, and that sucks ass for this movie.

So computer securities expert Max Peterson (Shane West) is minding his own business in Bangkok after finishing a job when he gets a mysterious package in the mail. The first thing that should have hipped him that there was something up with this package was it was delivered by DHL which is all but defunct, but he opens it anyway and lo and behold, inside is the world’s sweetest cell phone. The G-1 thought this phone was sweet. Next thing you know this phone is sending Max text messages about hotel deals and advising him not to catch planes that are about to crash and giving him sweet stock tips. Well now Max is a believer in this phone and his unseen benefactor, because when the phone tells Max to take a plane to Prague so that he can gamble, Max is on the first plane to the Eastern Bloc.

So Max is making all this money in this Casino due to his cell phone’s inside information, but of course Casino security is concerned about this situation. The Chief of Security at this joint, John Reed (Edward Burns), knows for a fact he has a thief on his hands and is about to take him in, until his former FBI colleague Dave Grant (Ving Rhames) steps in and claims Max for his own.

Seems that somebody somewhere is pulling Max’s strings to do something sinister, just as this somebody has pulled the strings, using this fancy phone, on some other people before it got to Max. The reason Max is useful to the FBI and the U.S. Gub-ment right now is because unlike those other people, he’s not dead yet. Now Max has to find out what the hell is going on and to do this he will need the help of the former FBI agent, current Casino security Chief and the resident badass to ferry him all over Eastern Europe in the hope of finding out the secret to the Echelon Conspiracy. Or something.

Though I’m pretty certain the similarities to ‘Eagle Eye’ were just coincidental, but the similarities to the ancient movie ‘War Games’ is almost criminal. Considering that me and Ed Burns are about the same age and I’m pretty sure we both saw ‘War Games’ in high school around the same time, Edward, being the accomplished film director that he is, should’ve pulled the current director of this film to the side and informed him with something along lines of "dude, this is just plain wrong, so let’s think of some other way to resolve this thing". Yes Mr. Burns, I’m holding you personally responsible, but I suppose by the time ‘The Echelon Conspiracy’ got to that point it probably didn’t matter all that much anymore.

It’s not that this is a mind-numbingly bad film because it does have enough elements in it to make it watchable, but similar to ‘Eagle Eye’ there were was a lot of head scratching stuff in this movie that really doesn’t come remotely close to adding up, but where ‘Eagle Eye’ was filled with wall to wall crazy action to keep one from contemplating its hole ridden plot, ‘The Echelon Conspiracy’ moves at much slower pace, due to what I’m sure was a much lower budget, forcing you to think on occasion which is always a bad thing for these kinds of movies. We do admire the attempts at script complexity, but the characters in this movie basically only do what they do because it serves the script and moves us to the next illogical plot point. By the time we get to the big reveal of what’s happening and why, it does seem like this flick went to an awful lot trouble to accomplish something that probably could’ve been done a lot easier. A little SPOILER but how in the hell does a computer poison somebody?

Shane West was functional, if not spectacular in his role and they did a good job keeping him pretty much a wimp throughout the movie, but he did manage to get laid in this movie which again seemed to just be an excuse to one get some progesterone in this movie, and secondly to bridge to another action sequence. In addition to Burns and Ving, the movie also had Martin Sheen as a scurrilous government head and Jonathan Pryce cashing an easy check with a couple of worthless scenes as the Casino owner. I’m not even going to get into his ‘killing the peacock speech’ which I think was supposed to mean something important.

‘The Echelon Conspiracy’ is a pretty silly movie that adds little to the whole Big Brother genre when it is at its best, and blatantly steals from better movies when it is at is worst. It is watchable, but then so are old episodes of ‘Hawaii Five-O’.