Dreadfully Boring

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

PLOT SPOILER REVIEW***The film starts out as an excellent thriller/mystery in spite of the lead being Shane West. Shane stars as Max "glass jaw" Peterson a man who installs programs in computers to prevent hackers. Max gets a strange phone that sends him text messages which saves his life and gives him money. We also know the government is after this device and other people have received such a phone and have died from following its instructions. At this point the film is an excellent thriller/mystery.There are few suspects and clues in this production and then we find out who's the culprit and the film becomes boring. Max saves the day from a stunt he saw in "War Games" or if you prefer, the Star Trek episode "The Changeling." At this point I groaned. Perhaps if you have never seen either of those two productions, this might seem pretty darn good. As for me, I got bored when I realized you could kill the "bad guy" by tripping over the plug.Ving Rhames always does a good character job. Outside of that, the film lacked. Might work as a rental. Better than most of the "Red Box" action.PARENTAL GUIDE: F-bombs, no nudity, brief love scene.

I would like to have the smartphone this guy gets ... it is so beautiful. I came across this movie by coincidence while zapping through TV channels. Great idea, very entertaining and an unexpected end. After reading many of those reviews here - "this is a copy of Eagles Eye" - I thought, great, another movie like this, I must see it. But honestly, I could not watch "Eagles Eye" to the end. It was too boring. So ... no. Both movies are based on a similar idea (like other movies: Colossus, I Robot, The Matrix or even Tron), but that's it. Maybe people who have watched "Eagles Eye" before and loved this movie will not like the "Echelon Conspiracy", I don't know. It is not a deadly serious movie, though. Sometimes a little irony shows and sometimes it made me smile. To me, "Echelon Conspiracy" is one of those few movies I can watch more than one time and enjoy those small details I discover.

Max Peterson (Shane West) is a world traveling tech security expert. He receives a mysterious phone anonymously which sends him helpful messages. It helps him avoid a plane crash, gives a stock tip and win at a casino. He encounters helpful driver Yuri Malanin in Prague. Casino security John Reed (Edward Burns) is suspicious. Kamila (Tamara Feldman) runs a scam on Max. Her partner knocks him out and they scan his phone. He wins a $3 million jackpot at the casino owned by Mueller (Jonathan Pryce) and is pursued by Reed. He is stopped and taken in by FBI Agent Dave Grant (Ving Rhames). Grant has been following untraceable texts to people who have sudden massive gains and then get killed mysteriously. Grant has been coordinating with NSA director Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen). The source turns out to be NSA central computer Echelon.First, Max is a prick. He is reckless and clueless. He is annoying as heck. I have no rooting interest in the character. He needs to be an everyman. Instead, he's an everydouche. It's kind of funny that even Reed calls him a douche. The movie should have great paranoid tension but this thing drags on and on. It should be him against the world but it takes forever for the first assassination attempt on Max himself. It should have started with NSA trying to kill him. This is basically as stupid as 'Eagle Eye' but without any of the fun. The WarGames ending isn't that good either because it feels derivative.

If you've seen any modern spy movie (with a budget/A-list actor fronting the film) or just any of the 'Bourne' films then you've basically seen a better version of 'Echelon Conspiracy.' It's not a bad film, just not quite as good as the ones it was based on. It has a decent enough cast to elevate it above most of the B-movie thrillers, but it's nothing we haven't seen before, i.e. it's a 'chase movie.' Shane West plays... whoever is going to be chased by... whichever shady agency is after him. Therefore, he gets chased from one European city to the next, narrowly escaping each time. Until such time as he can bring the perpetrator to justice.The first half doesn't contain an awful lot of chasing and, in my opinion, it's actually better for it. There's an air of mystery about it where you don't know what's going to happen and it is quite tense in places. However, the second half is where the action/chases take place and so it feels a bit like we've seen it all before.If you're in the mood for a Bourne clone of a movie then you could do worse than this.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/