Takedown

To be honest I watched this film purely for the fact that I am very interested in Hacker Culture/History.. and to my dismay, this film is far from the truth. However it does have its good sides.. it's portrayal of hacking itself and of people with an over-enthusiastic interest in computing for one. Where other hacker-orientated Hollywood movies show flashy tron-like graphics to depict gaining root on a system, Takedown shows you how it is. And the other good thing about this movie is just that... its a movie. If you ignore the fact that the majority of its plot is based on biased views from people who either disliked Kevin, or never even knew him, it's watchable. It contains all the aspects of a Hollywood movie that grab the viewer.. an original topic, a fast moving storyline, a so-called criminal that you really feel sorry for, an unjust American legal system, and a so-called victim who is just as bad as the depicted criminal. If you can easily switch off, this film is for you, but if you care about freedom of information, moral values and the fact that everyone has the right to a fair trial... go watch Freedom Downtime.

Takedown is the story of Kevin Mitnick and Tsutomu Shimamura's effort to bring him down.

Whatever the accuracies of the story (and considering the egos involved, I guess we'll never know), this is a pretty riveting tale of an underground hacker playing and defeating the system. Which is all you could ever ask for in a movie. :-)

Johnny Depp lookalike Skeet Ulrich, Russell Wong, Donal Logue, Cara Buono, Amanda Peet and Angela Featherstone make this low budget movie worth while.

Whether or not the real Kevin Mitnick is a nice fellow or what he did was totally legal doesn't detract much from this ripping yarn. The production values are ok (but what would you expect from a guy who spends most of his time sitting behind a monitor in a small room?), however, the concept makes it more than worth while. Especially the "social engineering" segments are cool. Not to be missed if you're at all interested in movies about sub-cultures and the guerilla mentality.

First of all, let's clear up some common misconceptions.

This film isn't "Hackers 2". You will find no CGI or parachute pants here. This film is about the capture of the notorious computer criminal Kevin Mitnick who used his technical skills and ability to influence people to gain access to things he really shouldn't have been able to access.

The thing that bothers me most about this film is the computer virus that Shimo wrote. I doubt that he did, and this makes Mmitnick seem worse by stealing it. The AI doesn't exist to put that virus around now, and it didn't 3 years ago.

The film in itself is a work of genius. This is the only realistic hacker film i have ever seen. Maybe because it was based on a true story and to put spinning DNA molecules on the computer screen instead of C++ would be a load of bollocks.

The acting is great; the pace of the movie is quick, especially in the part when the FBI almost captures Mitnick for the second time. The portrayal of the FBI in this film isn't very good, when they apprehended Mitnick, they didn't go in with 20 SWAT teams!

Kudos to Ulrich for his part as Kevin Mitnick, but as for Wong, I'm very surprised, where's the glasses and the geekyness? I know where, it got lost in the writing process, to make hackers look geeky and security experts look 'ard and sexy. In actual fact, security experts are just crackers in business suits. Kevin Mitnick did no damage, but they chase after him like he mass murdered a few police departments. I suppose they can't be totally realistic, and then the film would be an hour and a half of typing, with 30 minutes of chases and arrest.

I'm just glad there were no parachute pants ^_^

This was a movie that deserved to tank. Kevin Mitnick, a genius with computers who was a little too inquisitive for the authorities liking, has been the victim of so many abuses that it can make one's stomach turn. "Takedown" was adapted from a book written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura who exploited Kevin, a man about whom neither of the authors had any direct knowledge, and pretended to be Mitnick experts when in fact they couldn't have been more clueless.

Markoff, a hack journalist who did everything that he could to portray Kevin a danger to society in order to keep writing articles about him, has claimed wild rumors about Mitnick to be fact (rumors such as Kevin hacking into NORAD computers, harassing Christie McNickle, and converting home phones into pay phones) with no regard for the fact that he was demonizing Kevin in the eyes of society and in the eyes of a justice system - a system that would eventually lock Kevin in solitary confinement for 8 months because they were afraid he would use prison phones to launch nuclear missiles if placed in general population. Tsutomu Shimomura is nothing but a smart-ass hacker wanna-be whose main contribution to the book "Takedown" was a list of his skateboarding and eating habits.

If anyone out there really wants to learn the true Kevin Mitnick story, please view "Freedom Downtime" by Emmanuel Goldstein. [http://us.imdb.com/Title?0309614]

From everything that I heard about the original script (which was "obtained" under mysterious circumstances and leaked to the world before shooting started), I was expecting this movie to be really, really awful. I was pleasantly surprised to see that either Miramax, the writers, and/or the producers took some of the hacker community's complaints seriously, and adjusted the script accordingly. The final script that was filmed is certainly more even-handed and fair to Kevin Mitnick than Shimomura and Markoff's horrible book "Takedown" was (for a much better treatment of the Kevin Mitnick story, read Jonathan Littman's 1996 book "The Fugitive Game"), and we should be grateful that this film didn't end up being the hatchet-job on Kevin that we all thought it was going to be.

I was glad to see that the "trashcan cover scene", for example, didn't make the final cut, but a little disappointed that we weren't shown how large of a role that John Markoff played during Shimo's "manhunt" for Kevin, and then afterward; according to their own book, Markoff was present for many of the events that took place in North Carolina, and should have at least been shown in the scenes at the cell site alongside Shimo, Julia and the FBI agents.

They also could have done more with the "Lance" character, who represented a real hacker calling himself "Agent Steal" that was working for the FBI, and who figured prominently in the arrest and conviction of another hacker named Kevin Poulsen. (Poulsen's story, done properly, would make for a great movie too, but I digress..) Another no-brainer, slam-dunk scene that should have been in the movie, but wasn't for some reason, was Kevin and Shimo's one and only face to face meeting, in a North Carolina courtroom shortly after his arrest, where Kevin uttered his now famous line "I respect your skills" to Shimo.

I mean, it's no "Saving Private Ryan" or "Godfather Part II", but it isn't bad, either; in fact, it is a much more realistic and enjoyable movie than "Hackers" or "Sneakers" (to its credit, "Hackers" did have the lovely Angelina Jolie going for it), though not as much fun as "War Games", which is truly the "Citizen Kane" of hacker movies, or "Pump Up The Volume", which was more of a hacker movie than people realize, even though the "hacking" is done with a pirate radio station instead of a computer.

As others have already recommended here, go find a copy of "Freedom Downtime", the excellent documentary about Kevin that was produced by Emmanuel Goldstein and the staff of 2600 Magazine, you won't be disappointed.