PLOT SPOILER REVIEW***The film starts out as an excellent thriller/mystery in spite of the lead being Shane West. Shane stars as Max "glass jaw" Peterson a man who installs programs in computers to prevent hackers. Max gets a strange phone that sends him text messages which saves his life and gives him money. We also know the government is after this device and other people have received such a phone and have died from following its instructions. At this point the film is an excellent thriller/mystery.There are few suspects and clues in this production and then we find out who's the culprit and the film becomes boring. Max saves the day from a stunt he saw in "War Games" or if you prefer, the Star Trek episode "The Changeling." At this point I groaned. Perhaps if you have never seen either of those two productions, this might seem pretty darn good. As for me, I got bored when I realized you could kill the "bad guy" by tripping over the plug.Ving Rhames always does a good character job. Outside of that, the film lacked. Might work as a rental. Better than most of the "Red Box" action.PARENTAL GUIDE: F-bombs, no nudity, brief love scene.

Max Peterson (Shane West) is a world traveling tech security expert. He receives a mysterious phone anonymously which sends him helpful messages. It helps him avoid a plane crash, gives a stock tip and win at a casino. He encounters helpful driver Yuri Malanin in Prague. Casino security John Reed (Edward Burns) is suspicious. Kamila (Tamara Feldman) runs a scam on Max. Her partner knocks him out and they scan his phone. He wins a $3 million jackpot at the casino owned by Mueller (Jonathan Pryce) and is pursued by Reed. He is stopped and taken in by FBI Agent Dave Grant (Ving Rhames). Grant has been following untraceable texts to people who have sudden massive gains and then get killed mysteriously. Grant has been coordinating with NSA director Raymond Burke (Martin Sheen). The source turns out to be NSA central computer Echelon.First, Max is a prick. He is reckless and clueless. He is annoying as heck. I have no rooting interest in the character. He needs to be an everyman. Instead, he's an everydouche. It's kind of funny that even Reed calls him a douche. The movie should have great paranoid tension but this thing drags on and on. It should be him against the world but it takes forever for the first assassination attempt on Max himself. It should have started with NSA trying to kill him. This is basically as stupid as 'Eagle Eye' but without any of the fun. The WarGames ending isn't that good either because it feels derivative.

For the first 40 minutes, I was mesmerized by this film. The beginning was as thrilling and intriguing as any film I'd seen all year, but after that, the big secret is revealed and it became almost a shot for shot remake of Eagle Eye. It was seriously ridiculous how the two stories became almost exactly alike. Realizing this, the writers decided to throw in a big twist at the end, that might have saved the film had it made even a single bit of sense. Echelon Conspiracy begins with computer programmer, Max Petersen (Shane West), anonymously receiving a brand new, state of the art, cell phone in the mail. The phone gives him instructions which lead to him winning a lot of money. Everything is going great for Max, until he disobeys the phones wishes and the FBI shows up. Shane West was fantastic in this film, it really makes me wonder why he doesn't do more stuff like this. West seems to prefer romantic dramas, but is clearly missing his true calling. After seeing a performance like this, I'd easily put him at the top of the list for any major action film. West was paired in this film with Edward Burns who was terrific and Ving Rhames who was Ving Rhames. I say that, because sometimes he's the perfect fit for a role and other times, he couldn't be more out of place, a perfect example of which is his role in this film. As I said, this movie starts out great, but becomes exactly like Eagle Eye, I would venture to say that the two films are so much a like that the producers of Eagle Eye have a case for copyright infringement, it really was that close. Besides that, the film was a decent action film, with some nice performances. Had I not seen Eagle Eye, I may have thought more of this film, but as it stands, Echelon Conspiracy is just another low budget rip off of a semi-decent major motion picture and not much else.

Echelon Conspiracy (2009)Wow, this is an exercise in how to make a movie look good and not be good. It seems on the surface to have all these flashy elements, visual and plotwise (conspiracies, snipers, computers with minds of their own, you know the routine). But it's so crappy, to use a sophisticated word, it's painful. It's just badly directed. Yes, the script is lame, yes, the acting is lame. But the direction makes the least of even these elements. Why watch it? Why write a review? It's odd, really, that it can look so good and stumble so badly. If you watch the first minute, you'll be sucked in. If you watch five minutes, you'll see already how clumsy it is.Too bad. Some nice stuff in the wings here.