Excuse me while I get my soapbox, the jumbo sized one, and rant a bit. This weekend Cartoon Network aired the 2004 film "Catch That Kid." It's a somewhat cute, feel good movie about a 12 year old girl named Maddy who convinces her friends Gus and Austin to help her rob a bank of a quarter million dollars to pay for her father's experimental surgery in Europe. Confused yet?
Well, Daddy owns a go-cart track and Mommy runs a security firm that is installing a brand new, state of the art security system in a brand new bank. After all our main characters are introduced, Daddy falls over due to an old free climbing injury and is paralyzed from the neck down. Mommy has a horrible "boss" (she's a contractor) who won't lend her the money for the surgery because she won't skimp on the security to have it done by the time he's ready to throw a lavish party in the lobby and bring in the Big Money customers. You can find more details on the movie on Wikipedia here.
The kids are smart as they plan their robbery. Austin runs off to learn the commands that "turn off" trained guard dogs, Gus goes over to the building architect to get the bank blueprints, and Maddy goes into the office with Mommy to take pictures of all the security measures and get the passwords. Austin's encounter with the dog handler is brief, entertaining, and he gets the call-off word almost immediately, though he is completely unable to make it work and runs off in a brief chase scene, dog in pursuit. Gus and Maddy, though, they make strides.
Now here's where I start ranting. The blend of real life idiocy and apparent plot holes really got my goat, enough so that I actually started taking notes. Gus, who'd accidentally burned himself on a bbq grill, convinces the architect's receptionist to give him the bank building model out of the lobby case by telling her he's doing a school project and that his dad will abuse him if he doesn't get a high grade (he needs visual aids, of course). She tells him to "wait right here," fetches the key, and gives him the model. Now, any adult I know would have spent that time in the back office calling the Department of Family Services, not fetching a key for the building model, and keeping Gus there until the police and a social worker arrived to take him into custody. Thing is, I also know people who don't like to get involved and would do exactly like this receptionist did. Give the kid what he wants, get him out of the building, and feel good for keeping at least one burn off his arm, right?
Let's give it up for good ol' social engineering, a tactic used by scammers, con men, and identity thieves everywhere. Oh, wait. It gets better!
Not only is Maddy wandering around a nearly completed bank building taking pictures of cameras, barricades, keypads, and the like with her cell phone, but she gets one of the high up bank officials to take her on a complete tour of the building, showing her where all the nifty high-tech security gizmos are. He even admits to her that each keypad has a different password, but that he has one password that can go anywhere in the building, then types it into a keypad without covering it, and somehow misses when she takes a picture of the screen which shows an unobscurred password. His password? Deniro.
Really? Where's the encryption? Where's the random jumble of letters and numbers? Are twelve year old kids really such a non threat that a bank manager would let their passwords out so easily and not expect the damn thing to be posted on the internet within the hour? What's worse is that Mommy uses Maddy's full name as the Big Huge Safe password, meaning Maddy can guess the password in three easy tries (Daddy, Baby Brother, and then her) as she robs the bank. Newsflash, folks. Don't use family names, pet names, favorite movie star names as your password. And don't brag about how security your bank / network is and proceed to show all the details to people. That Is Bad. But, it was necessary for the movie plot.
The kids had it figured all out. A car height barrier in the parking garage has enough space underneath it to allow go carts to slip through. So the kids take go carts from Daddy's track, get into the garage, sneak into the party (wearing fancy outfits to fit in), then sneak into the security booth to turn off the motion sensors and other alarms. They allow themselves to be seen (no masks) by two very inept security guards (they have to be inept or the kids would never get to the safe), forget to wear gloves for half of what they are doing, use footage of the bank officer to convince the guards that the building alarms should be turned off, and use Maddy's climbing equipment to get to the suspended safe, then take exactly the amount needed for Daddy's surgery and high tail it to the hospital where they try to wheel Daddy out of the hospital and take him to the airport, where they have tickets for Europe, where the surgery would take place. Clever kids, right?
Not so fast. Guess what? The climbing equipment? Traceable. Plus it has Maddy's DNA on it, skin cells, finger prints, the whole ball of wax. The go carts? DUH! Daddy owns a race track and Mommy does security at the bank. Who do the authorities always focus on when a major robbery goes down? Assuming there are no other suspects, it's always going to be the people with the passwords. Let's not forget that Mommy has told people how much she needs to borrow for the surgery (the exact amount that was stolen), there are living eyewitnesses to the crime, and that the kids bought airline tickets that probably have their real names on them.
I was almost livid. Really? Are the writers really that dumb to leave that many plot holes in this flick? In real life, these kids would be lucky to get out of the bank… Except, as the kids get to the hospital, the authorities (and Mommy in particular when she hears the dollar amount and sees the climbing gear) put the pieces together and are right on the kids' heels. Now there are consequences. And while everything works out in the end, kids don't get Daddy off to surgery with the bank money.
Suddenly, the movie makes a bit more sense to me. What twelve year old kid would honestly remember to cover their tracks? They're being clever enough as it is. They probably don't realize the gear is traceable, and only the most anal of kids would think of wiping down surfaces to remove DNA and fingerprints.
If this had been a movie about adults doing this crime? I would have eviscerated it. And yet, people really do these things in real life. They forget about the little details, or the traceability of specialized equipment. In real life, "perfect crimes" rarely happen. So why do some authors create perfect crimes in their books, and why do others create crimes so poor that the protagonist should have solved the case in the first chapter?
The first thing to remember about creating a crime is to be consistent in what details get over looked by the criminals. It does no good to have a criminal obsessive about removing DNA evidence and then to have his last crime tainted by DNA all over the place so that Mr. White Hat can actually catch the criminal. Unless there is an established a pattern of escalation, or increasing desperation, that option doesn't work. And heaven forbid that the James Bond villain approach is used. Smart criminals should never suddenly get a case of the stupids unless they've become zombies or vegetables. Anytime an author writes about crime, the patterns should be established at the start of the book, and kept to faithfully unless one wants the reader to throw the book in the trash.
In "Catch That Kid," the consistent theme about the kids criminal commission was that they didn't, at any point, actually try to cover their tracks. They were so enamored of the plan to commit the crime, they didn't think about the aftermath. Success was their only option, and the only thing they focused on. Aside from the child abuse pretense (which really bothers me), the screenwriters covered their tracks on pretty much everything. We knew the movie had to have a happy ending, it's directed at the tween audience. Yet, the kids don't get away with bank robbery because they did make mistakes. In the end, this movie is more a lesson about dumb security mistakes adults make, and still make, in real life. Yes, despite the rampant news stories about identity thieves, phishing scams, and the like, people still make these mistakes.
I think this movie should be mandatory watching for every adult with access to a bank or a database. With pop-up bubble comments saying "Don't do this" or "Cover your hand when entering passwords." You tell me… agree or disagree?
