Cyber Wars -- 2006 -- PG-13

From the beginning, this one felt like a variant of the Matrix and a few other movies I've seen yet don't remember the titles to. We start out with some scrolling text to set us up so we aren't completely lost in the next scene which has our heroine chasing down a guy who has somehow changed his identity using a "simplant." The whole society is linked together via this "Cyberlink" and identity theft isn't so much of a problem as identity changing, or that's how I understood it.

A lot of the story details are rather convoluted, though the movie seems to flow well enough on what it does construct for us. How everyone is linked is never really explained to satisfaction, nor is how these simplant things help those who use them since they don't change the face, but just the perceived identity. The only time anything is used for identification purposes from a societal standpoint is getting into the subway. So....avoid the subway and no one catches you? Not seeing the threat here.

Our heroine is a bounty hunter and of course, she is the best because of her father or something that was also not fully delved into. She is charged to find a guy who can now put this simplant thing into his brain which makes a identity change permanent, and while this sounded very cool, the reason continues to escape me. She actually finds him very quickly in the overall plot, and we learn there's more to the story than just him.

This is where it gets very Matrixy and where we get into spoiler-world. What I can say is there is a lot of virtual reality in this world of theirs, and while it doesn't follow the exact plot of the Matrix (sorry, no machines controlling the world, and they are not living their lives as batteries in a big computer), there are a lot of elements that made the corrolation inescapable.

The characters all ring as very flat throughout and even when something that should be devastating occurs, it falls through because we have no investment in the story. The plot is interesting enough to keep going (even though parts of it don't make a lot of sense), but the characters are just going through the motions to get to the end. Special effects are decent, but very cartoony in a lot of places. It feels like a cheap TV movie where they wanted to do more than the budget allowed for. It would have been good to concentrate on the story first, and then build around that.

In the end, it wasn't the worst film ever. A lot more effort should have been put into developing the characters to the point that we understood them, and could invest in their problems. There were some scenes we could have gone without just to get a little more character. I don't know if it would have saved this mess since the very premise was not explained to my satisfaction (in fact, it was only explained in that little scroll up at the beginning...which was probably added in post when they realized it was never explained), but it would have helped. Good characters can sometimes save a bad story just because they're so hard to find.