Hackers

A hacker trying to make a name for himself (literally. You aren't 'elite' unless you have a username that it known all over the world),  Joey (Jesse Bradford), stumbles his way into some big company and into their files where he finds a strange looking file called 'garbage'. He manages to save some of it to his disk before he is kicked out of the system by the company's computer genius 'The Plague' (Fisher Stevens). Unfortunately the file Joey found is a worm program that is embezzling money from the company, and it The Plague that's behind it.  And he will do anything to keep it quiet.

The Plague, or as his girlfriend/boss calls him, Eugene, fabricates a virus that unless they pay a hefty amount of money will cause some of the company's oil barge to overturn. He places the blame on Joey, the hacker. The police track him down. but they find no evidence of the virus (or the worm program) so the let him go, but keep a tail on him. He leads them to his friends, the actual hackers and gets one of them arrested, 'Phantom Phreak' (Renoly Santiago).

One of Joey's friends is 'Zero Cool', a.k.a. Dade Murphy a.k.a. Crash Override (Jonny Lee Miller), a hacker that shut down something like 15 000 system at one time, when he was eleven. Plague gets to him, (because he's the only one on file) saying that he'll have his mom thrown in jail on some fabricated charge unless he gets the disk.  Also Dade himself could be sent to prison since he's on probation.

The rest of the group, after getting the disk and figuring out what's on in, determine that the only way to help their friend (and themselves, since there are warrants out for them) is to re-hack into the company and get the complete version of the worm program. They get a huge group of hackers together and  all at once they hack into the company Plague can't keep them all out.  They get what they want and then promptly get arrested by the police. As Dade's mom is yelling at the police, 'Cereal Killer', the only member that wasn't arrested was able to hack into the TV signal, thanks to two elite hackers that helped out on the assault of the company.  They get the message across and Plague is arrested and the teens are released.

I surprisingly liked this movie, only because the acting was excellent (minus one character) and the characters were well rounded and likable.  Razor and Blade (Darren Lee and Peter Y. Kim) freaked me out a bit but whatever. I had no idea what was going on most of the time, because the endless techno babble  made no sense to me and I think was made up. There was even a romantic (sort of) subplot that didn't even bother me that much that involved Dade and  Kate 'Acid Burn' (Angelina Jolie). Well, actually, it took up most of the movie with the other part being a secondary subplot for a good part of the movie. (It was pretty funny how their name together were Crash and Burn).

There was really only one thing that bothered me in this film. It was set in the near future, I'm guessing, but from 10 years ago so it was probably set around now. There were a whole bunch of weird costumes that the hackers wore, which is fine, people do wear strange things, but everyone else was wearing 90's clothes. And driving 90's cars. I guess the budget wasn't big enough to retro fit the extras. Oh well. It was a fun, good bad movie.

Grade: 5/10