At 2pm this afternoon, I met a fellow Yulblogger at the corner of Mont-Royal and St-Denis. We exchanged greetings, then he gave me the movie Takedown – based on the book about the arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick – and we parted.
Because of poor test screenings, the movie was only released in France. I had been wanting to see it for months, without any luck. Thanks to a chance meeting at the last Yulblog, I was finally going to be able to see this controversial movie.
I came back home tonight (after seeing a great movie), and decided to do a bit of reading about Takedown to refresh my memory. That’s when I found out that the news came out yesterday that nearly 6 years after it was filmed, Takedown will finally be released in America as a DVD at the end of September. Talk about weird timing.
« The film languished without a US release date amid rumors of poor test screenings and a re-shot ending. Perhaps hoping to recoup some of their losses, Miramax finally released the movie to French theatres in March, 2000, as Cybertraque. It was generally panned by critics: a reviewer for the newspaper Le Monde noted the film’s problems in translating a virtual manhunt to the action-adventure genre. « Can the repeated image of faces sweating over keyboards renew the principles of the Hollywood thriller?, » the paper asked. »
I wonder why they decided to distribute the movie in America now? I’m dreaming there might be a current surge of interest in hacker movies…
