Hackers (1995)

Genre: Crime/Action/Drama/Science-fiction

Starring: Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Renoly Santiago, Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford, Laurence Manson, Fisher Stevens, Wendell Pierce

An eleven-year-old Dade Murphy aka Zero Cool is charged with hacking into 1,507 computer systems in one day and causing a seven point drop in the New York Stock Exchange. Dade is banned from ever touching a computer till he is 18 and when he does turn 18, he is just the same. His parents are now divorced and his mother is moving to New York to find better career prospects. Dade follows her and is made to join high school in New York. There he meets Kate Libby aka Acid Burn (Jolie), Ramon Sanchez aka The Phantom Freak (Santiago), Emmanuel Goldstein aka Cereal Killer, Paul Cook aka Lord Nikon (Manson) and the young Joey Pardella (Bradford). Joey, in order to prove that he is just as smart as the others, hacks into a supercomputer belonging to a minerals company and copies a garbage file. What Joey doesn't realise is that the garbage file is not actually garbage and holds a virus. Eugene Belford aka The Plague (Stevens) is the companies IT chief and has planted the virus there himself. Eugene wants to cover his tracks and will do anything to make the world believe that Joey, with the help of Dade and his friends, are evil hackers who want to watch the world burn. The movie seems very hazardously made having no coherence or flow. Many subplots that don't add too much value to the movie and very tacky animation is what it offers. The animation and special effects hopelessly fails to replicate the action method that hackers use and seems to only predict their work environment in an unbelievable manner. Can only be enjoyed by computer geeks, maybe.

Thumbs up: Jolie looks quite attractive

Thumbs down: Not very thrilling as it could have been

Rating: 5.2/10