Cautionary tales are an interesting genre, essentially allowing viewers the vicarious thrill of a look at transgressive behaviour, only to punish it and restore all that is good and precious at the end. Derailed is one pernicious example. Clive Owen is led astray by Jennifer Aniston of Friends – presumably cast because she’s just the kind of edgy minx that middle-American men fantasise about. The moxie turns out to be allied with a treacherous Frenchie – zut alors! - and after losing his money and the life of the only black man he knows, Clive thoroughly regrets his dalliance with the flagburning jezebel. The story doesn’t have the courage of its convictions though: Aniston is killed at the film’s climax, not by Owen (who the intended audience would kind of like to have kill her, only he’s got to return to the straight and narrow at this point) but by a stray bullet in the showdown. This bit of flimflam is another example of a One Step Remove (see entry for Jan 2). So, Clive gets his family life back. He even gets to meet another black guy, who mentored the one whose death he was involved in, thus trading up from a bad black man to a good one. Order is restored. Even some mainstream Christian commentators found it offensive.

The same issues can be explored from another angle. Firewall positions Harrison Ford as the moral force at the centre of a story where his values are under attack. He’s a family man forced to do the dirty by a bunch of crooks who’ve spotted that the internet, having woven its way into every home and workplace, can be a thing of evil. Ford knows that better than most, since he’s in charge of a bank’s online security. The bad guys are led by Brit Paul Bettany, here on behalf of amoral psychopathic Eurotrash and thus quintessentially of the internet. He’s gathered a group of regular American folk, who probably ran old-fashioned numbers games or even had proper jobs before their roles were outsourced to online casinos and call centres overseas, hence edging them into criminality. And wouldn’t you know it, Bettany can and does kill his American cronies when they let him down. Americans are used to losing their employment through the invisible hand of the market, but being shot by your supervisor is crossing the line. Harrison Ford’s family are a plucky bunch though, and their greater knowledge of home and hearth allows them to pull through, the head of the family pitting his hacking skills against the bad guys. He robs them of the money they got him to relieve his employer of before restoring the integrity of the family unit. Run credits.

Hmm, Harrison Ford as a hacker? A hacker upholding family values? Times have changed. And that’s why screenwriters need to find ways of creating stories that reflect the world we’re living in and the worlds we’d like to live in, using the methods implicit in the changes that are happening to shape more distinct and relevant films.