Takedown (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (September 2007)

Takedown
Directed by	Joe Chapelle
Written by	Tsutomu Shimomura (book) John Markoff (book) David Newman Leslie Newman John Danza Howard A. Rodman
Starring	Skeet Ulrich Russell Wong Angela Featherstone Donal Logue Christopher McDonald
Music by	Chris Holmes James Kole
Cinematography	Dermott Downs
Editing by	Joe Rabig
Distributed by	Dimension Films
Release date(s)	September 28, 2004
Running time	92 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Takedown (2000), also known as Track Down, is a film about computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, based on the book Takedown by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura. The film was directed by Joe Chappelle and stars Skeet Ulrich and Russell Wong.

The real Shimomura has a cameo in the film, as his own heckler. This may be an double in-joke, one for author cameos and the other for independent researcher to duplicate, re-engineer, or do a skunk-works "clean-room" project, all of which usually is done undercover for various reasons, such as to avoid patent infringements.

[edit] Criticism

In Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Intrusion, Mitnick states that both book and movie are "extremely inaccurate" and based on media hype.

The movie features Mitnick hacking using a later Toshiba, perhaps a Tectra 530. The real laptops used were a Toshiba Satellite T1960CS and a Toshiba T4400SX. Both ran Windows 3.1 and are white in colour. The movie clearly shows a single grey laptop.

Mitnick and Shimomura meet twice in the movie, one of which prompts Kevin to flee to Seattle. This meeting did not actually take place.