PRODUCT PLACEMENT: SENIOR MOMENTS

Firewall

Directed by Richard Loncraine

The Pink Panther

Directed by Shawn Levy

Firewall and The Pink Panther pose the same minor problem for critics: how to resist writing knee-jerk pans of films that look an awful lot like Hollywood Product?

It's not easy. Both films star leading men who are arguably too old to be doing what they're doing, cultural icons whose sell-by date passed a while ago. The kidnap thriller Firewall expects us to believe that 63-year -old Harrison Ford, arguably the most underachieving A-list star in the history of American movies and very much an emblem of mid-20th-century manhood, is believable as an early 21st-century computer security expert, a real world action hero (however stalwart and vulnerable) and a settled yet virile husband to Virginia Madsen, who's 20 years his junior. (This May-September age gap occurs so much more frequently in pop culture than in life that I'm starting to think it's a propaganda conspiracy, bankrolled by rich movie producers with hot young second wives.) Added to that, Firewall is yet another example of what I call a Business Class Thriller, tailor made to engross upper-middle-class dads and granddads who spend lots of time on airplanes. The hero is usually, and not coincidentally, an over-40 or even over-50 married suburban dad who spends most of his time processing data and writing memos and filling out expense reports, but can still kick ass when the occasion warrants: i.e., the sort of character usually played by Harrison Ford. (The San Francisco Chronicle's film critic Mick LaSalle memorably observed that Ford "?holds a unique place in the action-movie pantheon: He has fought more guys while wearing a sports jacket and a tie than any man in history.")

Meanwhile, The Pink Panther remake asks us not just to accept an actor besides Peter Sellers in the role of bumbling French inspector Jacques Clouseau-a tall order, as Ted Wass, Alan Arkin and Roberto Benigni can testify-but to believe that star Steve Martin, whose career took a sharp left turn into Woody Allen/New Yorker country about 15 years ago, can still work magic in the type of vehicle that hasn't been central to his career since the first Bush presidency, a broad slapstick comedy that's not unduly interested in warmth or "heart." Both films seem like the sorts of projects that don't deserve the time of day, much less a halfway attentive viewing; they're the sorts of films for which critics can start mentally composing their pans en route to the screening room.

There's only one problem with this stock response: both Firewall and The Pink Panther are entertaining, well crafted, often surprisingly eccentric Hollywood movies. Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying these are revelatory films that will deepen with each viewing and will stand the test of time. I'm just saying that they're the types of movies that New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently complained weren't being made anymore: foursquare genre pictures with production values, stars and a bit of personality, not artful exactly, but smart and lively enough that you chuckle appreciatively as you watch them and think that maybe there's a bit of life left in the studio machine after all.

Firewall 's marketing campaign sells it as a cookie-cutter domestic thriller with technology-run-amok elements, along the lines of Panic Room or Cellular. It is that, but it's also something more: a two-fisted parable of the digital wall that's arisen between our private lives and the wider world (thus the title). Director Richard Loncraine (Richard III) and screenwriter Jack Forte takes Jack and his family from a complacent, nearly virtual existence (they live on the Internet, instant message each other in their own house, yammer incessantly on cell phones) to a purely visceral struggle for survival, gradually moving them from the cocoon of their palatial suburban fortress up into mountain terrain where cell phones, broadband and wireless don't reach. Without putting too fine a point on it, the movie forces its imperiled family to leave the cocoon and, in a sense, go back in time and live a more desperate, primitive existence.

Ford's character, Jack Stanfield, who designed the computer security system for Landrock Pacific, a small Seattle-based banking chain, is targeted for exploitation by villain Bill Cox (a silky, menacing Paul Bettany). The bad guy ensnares Jack in a Fugitive-like trap, saddling him with $95,000 in nonexistent offshore gambling debts and exacerbating tension between him, his coworkers (Alan Arkin and Robert Forster) and representatives from the international banking chain that's in negotiations to absorb it; then Cox holds Jack's wife and two kids hostage and threatens to kill them if Jack doesn't help him steal hundreds of millions from Jack's employers.

That's enough plot for a good-enough-for-government-work thriller. But Director Richard Loncraine (Richard III) and screenwriter Joe Forte are more ambitious than they let on. This is as much a life-as-incredible-simulation movie as The Matrix, but outwardly mundane rather than spectacular, and it's not content to dwell in a single genre for its entire running time. The first third feels like an old time B-movie kidnap drama-a genre versatile enough to encompass everything from the Bogart vehicles The Petrified Forest and The Desperate Hours to the westerns The Naked Spur and The Tall T. All these movies share an interest in the psychological dynamics that enable criminals to do their thing without feeling guilty; in other words, they're all keenly interested in moral choice, in the various ways in which the kidnappers justify their actions.