Star Trek Legend Scott Bakula Once Headlined A Doomed Tom Clancy Movie

Thanks to his roles as Dr. Sam Beckett on "Quantum Leap" and Captain Jonathan Archer on "Star Trek: Enterprise," Scott Bakula is a science fiction legend. Thanks to his other 70-plus roles — including a seven-season tenure as Dwayne Pride on "NCIS: New Orleans" – the same status applies to his overall career. However, it's a rare actor indeed who spends their years in the game going from success to success. As such, even a bona fide star like Bakula has had to taste the bitter pill of working on an utterly doomed project.

In this case, the project in question came from a prestigious source. Directed by Robert Lieberman ("The Expanse"), the ABC television movie "NetForce" (1999) is based on a Tom Clancy novel series of the same name — though, in a particularly odd example of Clancy name branding, he and Steve Pieczenik only created the concept and every actual book in the series is written by Steve Perry.

Bakula has some serious backup from a stellar cast that includes Joanna Going, Xander Berkeley, Brian Dennehy, CCH Pounder, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Kris Kristofferson, Judge Reinhold, and more, but unfortunately, the movie's very premise of a near-future FBI computer crime division meant that its story attempted to capture the internet as part of the story. Of course, that meant it was effectively doomed to be seen as outdated and nonsensical before the end credits even rolled. There are many great hacker movies you should have on your radar, but you won't see anyone put "NetForce" on a list like that.

Like Patricia Arquette and Ted Danson's quickly-cancelled "CSI: Cyber," "NetForce" opts for a Hollywood approach to cybercrime and cybercriminals. Here, Bakula plays the FBI Netforce deputy chief Alex Michaels. His team of plucky internet cops are up against a Bill Gates-coded tech mogul called Will Stiles (Reinhold), whose nefarious company is about to unleash a new kind of web browser that will allow it to supervise any computer on the planet and rule the internet. 

Of course, this is an action movie, so Stiles' evil plan of lording over internet users (a version of which multiple real-life corporations have since achieved with simple tracking cookies) isn't resolved by the researchers spending years at the computer, mainlining energy drinks, and attempting to compile enough evidence to bring down a billionaire. Instead, "NetForce" rolls out some Hollywood-ized moments including gunfights, explosions, and the occasional assassination thrown in. As a result, the movie's portrayal of both police work and technology are ... inspired.  

Watching "NetForce" today means that the suspension of disbelief required from the viewer is on par with reading an old Jules Verne novel and being cool with the concept of shooting people to the Moon with a giant cannon. It's not impossible to enjoy, by any means. However, even reviews from 1999 considered the near-future (the film takes place in 2005) visions of "NetForce" a bit too ho-hum to swallow as they are. If you're a Bakula completionist, there's fun to be had here, but on the other hand, if accurate hacking scenes in movies are your thing, "Star Trek: Enterprise" is probably a better Scott Bakula bet. At least the Federation's wild technology has the decency to exist in a project set hundreds of years in the future.