The Net 20

Plot

The movie opens with a scene of a young woman running from her pursuers in the streets of Istanbul. She is captured and imprisoned, accused of various crimes, and questioned by Dr.Kavak. Desperate to save herself, she starts her story in a series of flashbacks.

She is Hope Cassidy (played by Nikki DeLoach), a young computer systems analyst. Looking for excitement in her life, she accepts a well-paying job in Istanbul at Suzer International, where she will begin by securing the Internet network of a Russian company. She tries to convince her boyfriend, James, to go with her, but he is reluctant and she breaks off their relationship. While she is talking to him at a café, her laptop crashes and then reloads, a small incident she ignores.

While flying alone the next day, she checks her bank account online. A friendly stewardess, Roxelana (Şebnem Dönmez) serves her champagne and gives her a bracelet as a gift. As they talk, we see the money in her accounts drop to zero. When Hope arrives in Istanbul Airport, she is told by the immigration officer that she is having a tourist visa, which cannot be used for working purposes, and is advised to go to the American consulate in order to have her soon expiring passport renewed. Exiting the airport she is approached by a taxi driver who takes her to the Sultanahmet Palace Hotel in Istanbul, where he says the Americans love to stay. She gets a room and as soon as she lies down the fire alarm rings, everyone has to go out, and she is told that the guests will have to stay out for almost an hour. She then meets an American known as Z.Z. Kelly Ross. They take a walk in the park and come across a seller selling scarves. When she returns to her hotel room to get her passport, discovers the new one issued by the American consulate contains the wrong name. It seems that her identity has been stolen. She visits the company that has offered her the job, but there she sees that Kelly Ross, the girl from the hotel is working there by the name Hope Cassidy. She discovers $40,000,000 in her bank account and certain people are out to kill her. All people who knew her are found dead, including the taxi driver whom she met at the airport, who turns out to be a police officer. The police and Dr.Kavak don't believe her explanations, and accuse her for murdering the police inspector (the taxi driver) and the woman impersonating her, Z.Z.Kelly Ross. After an incident during her interrogation, she is given a shot,which puts her to sleep, and wakes up in a hotel room with her boyfriend, James, at her side. He calms her down that everything has been sorted out, but something in his speech makes her suspect him of taking part in all of this somehow. It turns out that he and Dr.Kavak (Demet Akbag) are the people behind the conspiracy against her, and it all happened because those two wanted her skills in order to have money embezzled from Ivanakov, a Russian arms dealer. She is taken to the bank in order to withdraw the money, but on their way out they are waited by the Russians and she seems to be accidentally killed during a rampage. She is taken away in an ambulance, where she wakes up, never being hurt, but pretended to have been so that the mafia should stop hunting her. By her side is Roxelana, the stewardess, who is in fact an Interpol agent (and so is the skarf seller), who reveals that thanks to the bracelet she gave her in the airplane (which was in fact a homing beacon), her whereabouts were known to the police (for her protection) at all times. She is leaving Istanbul with new identity, enjoying her first class flight back home, in front of her laptop.

Cast

Reception

Brent Simon of IGN rated it 5/10 stars and wrote that because DeLoach does not imbue her character with the same "sympathetic girl-next-door imperilment" that Bullock did, the sequel is pointless. Jeffrey Robinson of DVD Talk rated it 1.5/5 stars and wrote that it "is more likely to put you to sleep than keep you on the edge of your seat".