Many many years ago, there was a televi­sion series I kinda liked. They called it Knight Rider. I called it a guy in a cool car. I don’t remember much about those ancient days, but I still remember that I liked the series.

Over the last week, I watched the latest avatar of Knight Rider: the movie that aired on NBC. Now, it may have struck you as strange that I said ‘over the last week’, because people gener­ally don’t watch movies over a week. Give them two hours, and they’re done with it. But this one was different. This one was so bad you could have mistaken it for a soap opera. They might as well have sung me a lullaby.

Occasion­ally, the actors tried to act. Oh well, I’m sure they tried their best. See, this woman is chased by bad guys, who have probably killed her father. I suppose she believes in living “in the moment” though, because she only seems inter­ested in that car of hers. She’s also very inter­ested in knowing why her old boyfriend left her.

Like all movies, there’s this guy who claims to be the hero. He doesn’t do much, but I suppose they needed someone to fill the spot. He’s the son of the original Knight Rider, which is deemed an appro­priate excuse for pretty much every­thing he does. He’s also our heroine’s former boyfriend, who blew her off years ago for no reason at all.

There is no chemistry between them. She might just as well have eloped with the car.

And speaking of the car, this car has one of the most advanced artifi­cial intel­li­gence systems ever built. It can do a lot of things — access infor­ma­tion that couldn’t possibly be obtained, talk to people to make them feel better, and show pretty pictures related to every­thing it says. Unfor­tu­nately, its brilliant creator forgot to install a decent intru­sion detec­tion system, so the average bad-guy-geek can hack into its computer in what, twenty minutes?

Let’s skip ahead to the end. Actually, I still haven’t watched the ending, but let me guess how it would turn out. Obviously, our hero would claim some deep and dark reason for having abandoned his girl despite having loved her, and we would all be asked to feel sorry for him. Then the reunited couple would exchange the customary hugs and kisses, and would live happily ever after.

Maybe I’ll find out how it really ended, someday, but frankly, not knowing is turning out to be a far more exciting prospect.

I watched Bruce Willis’ latest Die Hard flick, Live Free or Die Hard aka Die Hard 4.0 recently. Assuming suspen­sion of disbe­lief, it was a reason­ably good movie. Apart from the crazy hacker stuff and John McClane’s (Willis) virtual indestruc­tibility, it was true to its prede­ces­sors in form and style.

Did you say McClane was indestruc­tible in the previous movies too? True, but then he didn’t battle a military jet or kill the bad guy by shooting him through himself. I bet the older John McClane could have given the Termi­nator a run for his money.

Never mind all that: what I simply cannot compre­hend is how everyone seems to have access to every single Govern­ment network possible. I do mean everyone — the hackers as well as the crackers. I know people can do some cool things with their computers, but this is way too much. Anyway, I was glad there was no third-time-lucky-password sequence (that is, the hacker/cracker is presented with a password prompt that he cracks on the third try, without ever having done it before.)

One impor­tant flaw, in my opinion, was that they paired up the wrong people. You know the classic plot — boy meets girl, rough times together, lots of destruc­tion, hugs and kisses all around, love at last, et cetera. But how the heck is that supposed to happen if the guy (Matt Farrell, played by Justin Long) spends all his time with McClane instead of McClane’s daughter? Looks like they really messed up that part of the story.

Overall, I would give it a rating of 3.5 out of 5. It could have been better. But wait — was it just a beta release?