Hackers

Thriller

Jonny Lee Miller
Angelina Jolie	Kate Libby
Jesse Bradford	Joey
Matthew Lillard	Emmanuel Goldstein
Laurence Mason	Paul Cook
Lorraine Bracco	Margo
Marc Anthony	Agent Ray
Renoly Santiago	Ramon
Fisher Stevens	Eugene Belford
Alberta Watson	Lauren Murphy
Darren Lee	Razor

Director	Iain Softley
Producer	Ralph Winter; Iain Softley
Writer	Rafael Moreu
Cinematography	Andrzej Sekula
Musician	Simon Boswell; Carl Cox; Liam Howlett

As a depiction of the computer-hacker underground, this movie is bogus to the bone. As a thriller, it's cartoonish and conventional. The premise (computer-happy kids hack into the wrong system, and the Forces of Repression come after them) is recycled from John Badham's 1983 WarGames. And the corporate-creep bad guy, played by Fisher Stevens, steeples his fingers and growls mossy villainous clichés. ("By the time they realize the truth, we'll be long gone with all the money.") For all its postmodern trappings the movie is working with sub-prehistoric storytelling tools. But it does succeed on one level, as a movie about adolescent bonding and alienation. The director, Iain Softley, helmed the Beatles-in-Hamburg biopic Backbeat, and he seems to have an instinct for the emotions that pull kids together around common interests and the insecurities that drive them apart. The familiar crises of loyalty and betrayal have an ache of real loneliness. It doesn't hurt that the two stars, Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy Williamson in Trainspotting) and Angelina Jolie (Gia), are just about equally gorgeous and charismatic; their longing glances steam up the screen. --David Chute