When I saw the ads for the new Harrison Ford film Firewall I said to myself, 'Self'...
1. Movies about computermachines where much of the thrill is watching someone click-clack away on a keyboard are kind of dull and will only get more dull the older they get - check out a early-nineties thriller where suspense is generated by watching the progress of file transfers on the screen, or where a legendary computer hacker mentions he will need a 56K modem and 10 gigs of RAM to do the job. Why would someone work all day lashed to a computer and then go to the movies that night to watch a movie star click away on a keyboard?
2. Harrison Ford is too old to play the parts he's playing these days - in Firewall his character seems to be in his forties, perhaps, as he has a youngish wife and two young children, but Ford is in his sixties now and it really shows. He seems like he just woke up at the best of times but now he's becoming crotchety as well. The last part where he seemed vaguely age-appropriate (despite his Boris from 'Bullwinkle' accent in the film) was as the Soviet submarine commander in K-19: The Widowmaker (which, by the way, he decided to do after dropping out of what became Michael Douglas' part in Traffic).
3. The window of opportunity to make a fourth Indiana Jones film has passed. Ford keeps hint-hinting in interviews that he and Spielberg are just ironing out the details, but unless they are planning a swashbuckling version of Grumpy Old Men, I think he's too old to be running around in the fedora and the bullwhip and getting the girl at this point. When he made the last one in 1989, Sean Connery played his father. Ford is now older than Connery was then. When you are a globetrotting archaeologist and the artifacts you are digging up are younger than you are, it's time to pack it in.
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