Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his pregnant wife are in a car accident where his wife and unborn child are killed. When they get Luke to the hospital, a thumb print scan shows that his insurance has expired, so they send him to "F" ward. Hope Industries shows up and the chairman, Virgil Kirkhill (Val Kilmer), tells the doctor that they want to save Luke's life with an experimental procedure. Luke's sister consents to save her brother's life, but Luke wakes up from the operation with no memory of anything. What he does know is that people keep appearing out of thin air in front of him, trying to sell him various products. He find out from another patient there that the only way to make the ads stop is to buy whatever they're selling, or steal it.
Luke decides to go the route of stealing since the store was closed. The cameras catch him though, and start the head exploding thing. Before his head explodes, he starts to get messages from someone who says they will help him, that they won't let him die. The two that are helping him, Punk Red (Tatiana Maslany) and Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger), are resistance hackers. They can get into Luke's brain and try to turn off the programming. Now that Luke's failsafe doesn't work, Hope Corporation wants him dead. This time though, someone chose the wrong man. Luke used to be Special Forces, so even though he doesn't remember any of it, he's still got all the training locked in his brain to be used when needed. Once Luke hooks up with the resistance, maybe there is a chance he can survive this nightmare. What he finds out from them about the Hope Corporation is even more disturbing. With his help, maybe they can bring this evil corporation down.
There is also one special feature available on the DVD, a making of featurette. It's really quite interesting to find out all the little details about the movie, things like the city set used was actually originally from The Watchmen, just stripped down to make it grungier. The filming was only 17 days, which is very impressive. It looks like it took much longer!
Hardwired is a very good action sci-fi movie, a lot better than I expected even. If you like action or sci-fi, I recommend you go pick it up today!
