Firewall is the year's first guilty pleasure.

It's poorly constructed, slow through its first two acts and, at its worst, a Frankenstein assembly of better Harrison Ford movies (most notably Air Force One), but gosh darn it, it's just enjoyable beyond any expectation. And Harrison Ford, that old dog, he's still got it. And by "it" I don't mean acting prowess, but screen presence.

In Firewall he plays a computer expert that looks downright silly in front of a computer. Ford's hands are those of a carpenter not a computer geek. Still, he works because he plays a fish out of water: a president turned action hero, archeologist turned Nazi hunter, CIA analyst turned drug warrior, doctor turned fugitive, smuggler turned star captain, and, in Firewall's case, techie turned bank robber.

Ford is Jack Stanfield, a bank's head security man. When his family is kidnapped and held hostage within their home, Jack's only hope of getting them out alive is to obey the somewhat pleasant bad guy, Bill Cox (Paul Bettany), who demands Jack hack into his own bank and do what most computer hacking movies require: steal $10,000 from 10,000 wealthy accounts. Because no one ever notices when $100 million goes missing.

Bettany is a better actor than the material will allow him to be, but he's British, and accents make for great villains. He's shown here as a suave gentleman with respectable manners and trim suits. Jack flips out when he catches his son enjoying Bill's bad guy pancakes, which almost prompts the movie's greatest line, "Son, no blueberry pancakes with the kidnapper ... but buttermilk's OK."

Firewall builds up and up and up until Jack is eventually (finally) stealing the money, which he does with a scanner from a disassembled fax machine and his daughter's iPod. The fact that this scheme is even tried -- forget that it's successful -- would make MacGyver wet himself. That's part of the fun, though: Firewall flies by the seat of its pants, even when it dabbles in fantasy.

The movie surpasses other films of the same genre in small ways that I admire. For one, Bill presents his plan to Jack, who dismisses the whole thing as impossible. Rather than hold cute infants or handicapped nuns at gunpoint until Jack concedes to the plan, Bill's face turns white and he stands there like a dope holding a memory card that can't fit into the bank's computers. He's stunned that all his careful planning has yielded approximately zero dollars and one stack of pancakes. I liked Die Hard, but I was pleasantly pondering what the film would have been like if the bad guys didn't have all the answers like Firewall.

Despite all the careful, and not-so-careful, planning, Bill and Firewall lead up to a fistfight and shootout in a lakeside cabin. Did this conclusion surprise me? Not really. It's the best ending a film like this can expect given the quality of the writing. Below-average script or not, though, here's a film that doesn't joke around about what it is. Firewall is dreck. It knows this and appreciates it. And so do I.