War Games: The Dead Code (2008)

Directed by: Stuart Gillard | 95 minutes | drama, thriller | Actors: Matt Lanter, Amanda Walsh, Colm Feore, Gary Reineke, Susan Glover, Nicolas Wright, Chuck Shamata, Maxim Roy, Trevor Hayes, Claudia Ferri, Vlasta Vrana, Ricky Mabe, Claudia Black, Russell Yuen, Robert Higden, John Maclaren, John Koensgen, Alberto Delburgo, Lucinda Davis

‘Wargames’ was a popular movie in the eighties, one of those movies that many people remember with warm feelings. A very young debutant Matthew Broderick stole the show in this high-tech thriller, set at a time when computers were still mysterious. More than a quarter of a century later, ‘WarGames: The Dead Code’ follows. The majority of households already have such a thing at home and the mysterious and threatening things have been removed a bit.

‘WarGames: The Dead Code’ is neither a remake nor a sequel, the only thing both films have in common is the WOPR or Joshua and its creator, Professor Stephen Falken. ‘Wargames’ has had a 21st century makeover and that means Joshua has now been taken over by RIPLEY (not the only lame reference to other movies), a supercomputer, and the political situation is also very 2008, because instead of the cold war we worry about the War on Terror.

Our hero is the Philadelphia-based intelligent Will Farmer, appropriately portrayed by Matt Lanter – not quite as fun as Matthew Broderick, but he does the job. His comrade Dennis Nichols (Nicolas Wright) urges him to play an online game, which, however, is RIPLEY’s way of finding out if you’re a potential terrorist. Playing the game costs a lot of money – Will gets it by looting his Syrian neighbor’s bank account (he wants to pay it back if he wins) – and if you’re good enough to pass a certain level, you must be a terrorist . If you want to have fun with ‘Wargames: The Dead Code’ you have to throw all your sense of logic overboard from this point on. Meanwhile, Will manages to win the favor of the attractive Annie D’Mateo (Amanda Walsh), who is not only beautiful in appearance, but also uses her brain to the fullest: she plays chess and foils Will’s invasion of her PC…

At the Ministry of Intelligence and Information, we meet the team behind RIPLEY who have just automatically eliminated a group of suspected terrorists with a precision of 98.6%. Proud of his “girl” is head of the department, T. Kenneth Hassert (Colm Feore), but when Will gets to the level that gives him a red flag to his name, all the alarm bells go off and not only becomes Will’s neighbor arrested, also his mother, who works at a chemical factory (and therefore has plenty of opportunities to make a bomb) is taken away. Will doesn’t know anything about it yet, he’s on his way to Montreal for a chess match, because of Annie. At the airport he notices that something is wrong, he involves Annie in the whole and the rest of the film the two spend fleeing from the team behind RIPLEY. Stephen Falken lends a hand and in the end Will has to make sure Joshua takes on RIPLEY

‘WarGames: The Dead Code’ is a mostly redundant film. As mentioned, the film lacks almost any kind of logic. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, as long as the story could be followed, but screenwriter Randall Badat has missed the mark here too. There is regularly no strings attached: characters are simply dismissed, Hassert turns like a leaf on a tree, the computers are assigned properties that will make anyone with an ounce of IT knowledge burst out laughing, … it’s not about to be happy. Fortunately, the expectations of most fans from the first hour will not be too high and with that approach there is still fun to be had with the film. Typical case of mind at zero, watching and forgetting afterwards.