While I.T.’s themes about the invasion of privacy and a continued reliance on technology are both believable and relevant, the message is lost with sleazy shots of bare flesh and an unbelievably bad story that beggars belief. This isn’t even mentioning the sheer stupidity of the characters or the poorly written script. The story follows Mike Regan (Pierce Brosnan), a rags-to-riches millionaire living the perfect life. He has a beautiful wife, a teenage daughter and is the owner of a multi-million dollar aviation company on the brink of revolutionising the industry. Unfortunately, tech temp Ed (James Frecheville) has other ideas and “hacks” into Mike’s smart home and life to cause havoc. I say the word hack lightly here as it basically devolves to a man sitting with numerous flat screen monitors up on a wall pressing buttons to hack into medical records, camera feeds, business records and more. Furthermore, this is made worse that we’re told this man has “serious psychological issues” but yet no one at the company (which we’re told is highly successful numerous times) thought to do some thorough checks on this man before hiring him. This is made worse by Mike’s absolute obliviousness to allow the man he’s met for less than 2 days into his home to fiddle around with his electronics. You can’t help but feel he should have known better and its hard to feel compassion for someone this stupid which makes the rest of the film, which includes Mike trying to get his life back by hacking the man who hacked him, hard to be invested in. It also makes for a pretty uncomfortable watch at times as Ed stalks Mike’s 17 year old daughter. The camera has a horrible tendency to show far too much skin of this girl including an intimate shower scene and numerous shots of her bare legs. The sleazy shots just devalue any sense of empathy we’re supposed to feel for these characters and aside from some clever lighting shots, the camera and prop work really isn’t very good. Overall, I.T. is not a good film, nor is it a comfortable watch. It’s too serious and sleazy to laugh at in a cheesy way and too stupid to be taken seriously as the characters stumble from one stupid action to the next. This fluctuating contrast just makes the whole film end up a bland, terrible mess that needed a tighter script and better writing to execute correctly. Aside from a good opening fifteen minutes and a semi-decent tense scene inside Ed’s house, the rest of the film is a mess.
