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For whatever reason (and the reason is explained later on), Morgan
Sullivan (Jeremy Northam) wants to become an industrial spy with Digicorp,
and Digicorp are just happy to welcome him aboard and send him to a series
of conventions all over the country to collect data for them - and it
doesn't occur to Sullivan that these conventions lack any significance and
are hardly what one would call a hot item.
Then though Morgan meets Rita Foster (Lucy Liu), who proves to him that
all these conventions are just part of a brainwashing process, and that
before long he is supposed to become someone else, one of Digicorp's real
agents. Rita gives Morgan pills to protect him against brainwashing but
persuades him to go along with the game anyhow, on behalf of Rita's boss,
the mysterious Sebastian Rooks, who has promised to get Morgan out of it
all ...
Soon enough, Morgan finds himself in a new home, with a new wife, and
with a new job, at Sunways, Digicorp's main rival. At Sunways, security
boss Calloway (Timothy Webber) quickly identifies Morgan as a Digicorp
agent ... and couldn't be happier, since now Sunways can feed Digicorp
bogus information.
It all culminates in a trip to the vault, a secret underground
computer lab, where he is supposed to either feed the computer the disk
that Sunways gave him, a disk that Digicorps gave him ... or a disk
provided by Sebastian Rooks. Now Morgan knows that each of the three might
want to dispose of him in one way or the other, but ultimately he decides
he trusts Sebastian Rooks the most (that he has fallen in love with Rita
Foster might have to do with it, and indeed, Rooks' disk is fed into the
computer (and some valuable data loaded onto the disk, I presume) just
before Morgan is found out to be a double (triple ?) agent, and he can
escape only just, and only with the help of Rita Foster, who stops by in a
handy helicopter.
But Morgan feels pretty much on the edge, since he has no idea if he
can even trust Rooks, so he gets into a fight with Rita, and even wounds
her with his gun ... before he finds out he himself is Sebastian Rooks,
who has gone through all the dilligent brainwashing (a technology he
himself has developed, by the way) and double and triple espionage to get
close enough to both Digicorp and Sunways.
Fortunately, Morgan remembers just in time, since both Digicorp and
Sunways security are already closing in on him ... and only just in time
does Morgan remember how to fly a helicopter to escape together with Rita,
and blow upthe building roof his opponents have followed him to.
The ending sees Morgan and Rita on a yacht somewhere in the South Seas.
And the valuable information Morgan has risked everything for - it seems
to be Rita's identity, which he has now removed from Digicorp's and
Sunways' databases - though don't ask why, it was just an act of love, in
some way.
According to legendary thriller-director Alfred Hitchcock - inventor of
the word MacGuffin if not the MacGuffin as such - a MacGuffin
is the thing that gets the plot of a thriller going, but during the course
of the movie it becomes rather unimportant what that thing actually is (a
theory I don't necessarily agree with).
Speaking of MacGuffins, there might have hardly ever been a film
with a MacGuffin as vaguely as this one. Yes, it's about computer
data, but who uploads or downloads what remains terribly unclear, and when
the data in the end is revealed to be Rita's identity ... now that doesn't
make all that much more sense, does it ?
However, rather surprisingly the fact that one has no idea what Cypher
is actually about does not make it a bad film, it's a well-made,
suspenseful cyberthriller that doesn't lose itself too much in fancy but
meaningless effects and technobabble, instead keeps its story going at a
reasonably fast pace and offers a few unusual plottwists along the way.
The outcome is maybe not a great or even memorable film, but solid
entertainment anyways.
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