Echelon Conspiracy (DVD)

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As near as I can figure it, "Echelon Conspiracy" either played in my neighborhood for a weekend or not at all. The fact is, I had never heard of it until I looked up the actors at IMDb, where I discovered that Dark Castle/Paramount made the movie back in 2007, then shelved it for a couple of years before releasing it to a limited run in 2009. It made all of half a million dollars at the box office, so this DVD release is essentially its debut.

Judging by my experience with the film, Paramount knew what they were doing by not putting it out in wider theatrical circulation. It wouldn't have been worth their bother. You remember DreamWorks's 2008 conspiracy flick "Eagle Eye" with Shia La LaBeouf? You've got the same thing here, but on a smaller scale and with a less-prominent star. Worse, "Echelon" doesn't really compare favorably even with that fairly average action yarn. Indeed, it is puzzling why Paramount released "Echelon Conspiracy" to theaters at all, unless they realized they had their big-money earners "Star Trek" and "Transformers" coming out later in the year and figured they were financially comfortable enough to take a chance. Who knows.

Certainly, the film doesn't lack for star power. For an essentially straight-to-video product, it's got several big-name actors in it, like Ed Burns, Ving Rhames, Jonathan Pryce, and Martin Sheen, with a star, Shane West, who's been in the popular "ER" television series the past few years. The problem is that none of them shine like stars.

The opening sequence sets the mindless tone of the picture by showing us a woman instructed by cell phone to find a location on the tracks of a subway tunnel, where a train runs her over. Yeah, well, what would you expect to happen, trapped inside a working subway tunnel? Was she an idiot, or did the filmmakers think we were?

The main character is a young fellow, Max Peterson (Shane West), a computer engineer who installs security systems for big corporations. He becomes the innocent man caught up in a web of schemes not of his making. One day while working on a system in Bangkok, he receives a snazzy new cell phone in the mail from an anonymous sender. Then he starts getting untraceable messages on the phone, messages that help save his life and subsequently enable him to win huge fortunes at slot machines and blackjack tables. Max is a very happy man, his greed blinding him to the fact that you don't just get something for nothing.

Next, the phone directs him to go to Prague, Czech Republic, where "riches await." He goes, and there he meets Yuri Malinin (Sergey Gubanov), a Russian telecommunications specialist, computer hacker, and cab driver. Yuri will come in handy as the story proceeds. Poor Max, though. Although he's supposed to be a tech geek, he doesn't recognize that spy cameras are watching his every move everywhere he goes. Somebody or something is manipulating him, but he doesn't question any of it, blithely following his cell-phone directions. More to the point, he starts winning big at a hotel-casino, and he attracts the attention of the casino's security chief, John Reed (Ed Burns), who is a former FBI agent, as well as the casino's ultrarich owner, Antonin Mueller (Jonathan Pryce), both of whom begin getting suspicious.

Into the bargain, Max starts getting bumped around, like knocked out cold, only to awaken glowing and refreshened and staring into the eyes of a beautiful, sexy, young woman, Kamila Martin (Tamara Feldman). There's always a beautiful, sexy, young woman in these things. I think it's written into the official motion-picture thriller rule book. Needless to say, she turns out to be more than she appears.

One might believe all of this, gladly go along with it, if the movie had the tongue-in-cheek aura of a typical action adventure; but, instead, it tries to pass itself off as a serious espionage mystery and fails. The movie isn't so much outright bad as it is simply flat and routine.