THIS tale of high-stakes corporate deception falls short of its potential.

Directed by Australian Robert Luketic, its screenplay, the second for each of Jason Dean Hall and Barry Levy and their first co-operation, unfolds in the high-stakes game of IT innovation.

Liam Hemsworth plays Adam, a nerd with ideas but no funds for their development. Gary Oldman plays Wyatt, head of an IT firm with funds but no new product to fertilise growth. Harrison Ford plays Goddard, once a partner with Wyatt, now heading a firm with a novel idea in need of a whiz-kid to implement it.

Wyatt recruits Adam to get a job with Goddard and spy on development of the new idea. By coincidence (don’t you just love coincidence ?) Goddard’s marketing guru Emma (Amber Heard) has turfed Adam out of her bed after a one-night stand. On closer examination, Emma turns out to be a whey-and-water proposition whose post as marketing manager in a big corporation is hard to take seriously. So is her romance with Adam after she reverses her original rejection of him.

A more interesting romance would have been between Adam and Wyatt’s tough PA Judith (Embeth Davidtz), whose bedroom potential never gets explored, thereby missing an opportunity to drive a somewhat listless plot in a different direction from its techie razzle-dazzle industrial espionage theme.

Bottom line? Two dramatic threads, neither given scope to build enough conflict or tension to energise the film to its full potential.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight