Takedown (2000)

The movie is fine, but what makes me flush it down the drain is that the people creating it portray it as a true story, when it is in fact BS! Kevin Mitnick never caused money loss or economical losses for the companies claimed. He sat locked down without contact to the world. 3 years without trial, probation or bail. FREE KEVIN. He did hack into companies to get code for the reason of doing it. This is a crime usually punished with a fine or a month in jail. Kevin sat inside until 2000, and got to use the internet not until 2003. This man is a hacker yes, not a cracker. The justice system is about who wins a case, the federal government or you. John Markoff at the NY Times made Kevin so famous with his ignorant articles that the government couldn't afford to loose this one. Kevin is a true product of the American ways, stupid morons that have no idea how to use a computer sit and try to educate the people who do, hackers, by using there money, influence and power to shut them down. Imagine the argument the government gave for Kevin being in solitary today, "if he so much as has access to a payphone, he can call a certain number and whistle a certain frequency to create a nuclear war". This is one of the reasons Kevin sat in jail for! What bullshit, big brother sees you and then some more. Free Kevin Mitnick.

www.2600.com

FREE KEVIN

Watch Freedom Downtime instead.

Fmovies: "Takedown" is a dire film. Poor direction, poor acting and an embarrassingly bad script make this a film to avoid at all costs. The story of Kevin Mitnik is a fascinating one but "Takedown" misses the mark by miles. If you want to watch a well-made and fun film about hacking, then watch "Wargames". If you want to know the truth about what happened to Kevin Mitnuk then watch "Freedom Downtime". There's simply no reason to watch "Takedown".

I believe many people started watching this movie expecting it to be very bad - and I hope many will be as pleasantly surprised as I was. It isn't bad. In fact, it's quite good. Yes, it oversimplifies a lot (though compared with "Hackers", it seems ultrarealistic...) and, as far as Kevin's real story goes, it makes up some things that never happened (for instance, Kevin and Shimomura did not meet in life) - but overall, it's definitely worth watching. Those who followed the way its script had been changing over the years, certainly remember how bad and unfair it was in the beginning - it portrayed Kevin as a criminal of no feelings, and was extremely one-sided, based only on Shimomura's and Markoff's book and relations, and shown from their point of view. Hiring a new writer and looking for sources in a book other than that by M&S helped, however, and the result is a pretty fair, objective movie that shows Kevin as a human, not as a monster. The only thing that should be severely criticized is throwing in the scene with Kevin attempting to distribute Shimomura's nonexistent S.A.T.A.N.-like utility, but other than that, the script treats things fair. See this movie... and while watching it, remember that although at this moment Kevin is already free, he is not allowed to access any kind of computer - which means that he cannot even use a cell phone or a cash register... Perhaps a new movie, "Kevin Free", might portrait his life nowadays.

Takedown fmovies. 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.

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.

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 ^_^