NetForce (1999)

I was impressed with the modern gadgets.I think that the premise that in the future the internet will have to be policed is a compelling idea. The movie did lack character development in some areas, but the acting and action was well done. I also thought that Scott Bakula did a really wonderful job, as always.I have never read the Tom Clancy novel, 'Netforce', but perhaps that was for the best. Usually movies made using novels as the basis end up feeling like tin foil. Seeing this movie without having read the novel I felt the story was complete. The storyline was interesting and without holes.

Though lacking in character development, Tom Clancy novels are superb for their plot intricacies and fervent attention to detail. The Hunt for Red October -- the best film adaptation of the Jack Ryan series thus far -- still stands as my favorite film of all time.Like any writer sensing opportunity, Clancy decided to franchise his name to such series as Op Center and Net Force. Op Center was actually a surprisingly "OK" TV mini-series, thanks to the efforts of Harry Hamlin and Lindsay Frost. Net Force, however, is a total disaster.It's difficult even to establish blame. While the notion of an Internet investigations division of the FBI sounds appealing (isn't the Secret Service in fact charged with this responsibility?), everything in Op Center is ludicrous. The sophomoric romantic storyline of Bakula and Going, the uber Bill Gates villain played by Judge Reinhold, and the Kris Kristofferson (Can you believe he was in fact a Rhodes Scholar and former Army pilot??) dead mentor with a secret -- all of this just defies conventional wisdom or reality.Without belaboring the point, Net Force is just plain not entertaining.

"NetForce" has some okay shoot-em-up action scenes although otherwise it is a long "movie" at 160 minutes. If you know the typical pacing for episodic TV shows, and if you knew that this was originally an ABC TV mini-series that was first broadcast as a two-part mini-series in February 1999, then you can easily calculate that this movie was originally a two-part mini-series where each part is about 80 minutes for each part without the commercials (each part would be about 80 minutes plus 40 minutes of commercials...which would be about 40 minutes of story per hour plus the 20 minutes of commercials for each broadcast hour) and when put all together for videotape sales/rentals then you have this 160-minute movie without the commercials. (If ABC picked up "NetForce" as a regular series, each of the two parts could have been cut into two episodes each for a total of four episodes -- watch the pacing of this movie and you can guess where the commercials would go in and where each part/episode ends at each 40-minute mark and 80-minute or thereabouts.) Anyways, this 160-minute movie is the whole mini-series without the commercials.In comparison to other more recent ABC TV shows, the fictitious "NetForce" division depicted in this 1999 ABC TV mini-series is a pre-9/11 production that is suppose to be depicting what is happening in 2005 and you may find "NetForce" could be lacking in comparison to what you would find in the 2003 ABC TV regular series "The Threat Matrix" or in the current ABC TV regular series "Alias". Although "NetForce" uses the internet as a major story angle, "NetForce" is more akin to being a like an early stumbling version of "The Threat Matrix" -- but in the pre-9/11 days you would not know any better. So it's not bad for 1999, but you would expect more today. Okay to watch, but perhaps not as good as what you may find in "The Threat Matrix" or "Alias". "NetForce" is a pre-9/11 show and so there are no "terrorists" in this movie unless if you want to say the greedy billionaire in this movie is a terrorist or if you want to say that the trigger-happy convicts he hires are terrorists or if you want to say that the genius computer programmer (who I think is suppose to be from India) is a terrorist. They actually seem to be more like a bunch of greedy crooks in this movie.I bought this videotape for 99 cents at a local supermarket where it was in the bargain bin shelves. Since Scott Bakula was in it, then I thought why not watch it to see some of the stuff he did in the years between his work on "Quantum Leap" and "Star Trek: Enterprise". Also, I didn't watch this when this was first broadcast, so it was a good opportunity to catch on what I missed watching on the TV.The ending of this "NetForce" movie is good for episodic television where the TV viewer is strung along to keep watching the next show to find out what happens next, but I got a little antsy having to wait through whole thing to get to the end. Maybe if they put the commercials in then I probably wouldn't have been so antsy.

This movie got a lot of bad reviews, especially from so-called "techies". I think the fact that the movie used ridiculusly wrong terms for it's technical effects had a lot to do with it's low reception. Substitute "thingie" for every reference to "website" and so on, and it won't be very painful at all.The plot was all right, I liked the allusion to the Windows lawsuit and the treatment of the real danger of homogenization of the 'net. At 2 hours 40 minutes, it was way too long, though.All in all, it was bearable. 5 out of 10.