Hackers (PG-13)
A.V. Club; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; AMC+; Fandango; Google Play; YouTube

Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 1995, and I'm sure I saw it sometime in the '90s. But by the time I watched it again in 2025, I didn't remember anything specific about it. I'm putting my review under "crime films" because Wikipedia calls it a "crime thriller", and there's definitely crime involved, but I found it only slightly thriller-ish. I'm still not entirely comfortable with this category, but I'm not sure where else to put it. I was considering "serio-comedy", but that doesn't feel quite right, either. Anyway, the movie didn't do well critically or financially, but it's become a cult movie, I guess. In the mid-90s, hacking was a bit of a new and zeitgeisty concept, I'd say. I don't really know anything about hacking, but I'm pretty sure this movie isn't a very realistic depiction of it. Still, I think it's kind of cool.

It begins in 1988, when an 11-year-old hacker named Dade Murphy, aka "Zero Cool", is arrested, tried, and convicted for hacking. The judge sentences him to not using a computer or touch-tone phone until his 18th birthday. His family is also fined $45,000 dollars. Seven years later, Dade (now played by Jonny Lee Miller) is living with his divorced mother, and they've just moved to a new city (New York). Having just turned 18, Dade hacks a TV station that's playing some sort of late night talk show hosted by some racist guy. Dade controls a robotic arm that takes out the VHS tape (which says "America First", so don't think Trump was the first racist to use that phrase), and replaces it with a tape of the 1960s series The Outer Limits. But then he receives a message on his computer from a hacker called Acid Burn, who claims Dade is intruding on their turf. He starts to identify himself as Zero Cool, but changes his mind and uses the handle Crash Override. They battle for control of the TV station's VCR, and Acid Burn wins.

Later, on his first day at his new high school, Dad joins a group of hackers including Ramon "Phantom Phreak" Sanchez, Emmanual "Cereal Killer" Goldstein (Matthew Lillard), Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie), and a novice hacker named Joey Pardella, who hasn't got a handle yet. They also later hook up with a hacker named Paul "Lord Nikon" Cook. (It will be some time before Dade learns that Kate is Acid Burn, but I don't really consider that a spoiler.) Anyway, one night Joey hacks into a supercomputer at the Ellingson Mineral Corporation, and manages to copy part of a garbage file to prove his feat, before his mother turns off his computer. He hides the disk with the file, but is later busted by the Secret Service, led by Agent Dick Gill. The Secret Service is working with Ellingson's computer security expert, a hacker named Eugene "The Plague" Belford. It turns out Plague had created a worm that is siphoning funds from Ellingson, and that's what Joey had found. However, he has also created a virus called Da Vinci, to cover his tracks, and claims the virus had been created by Joey.

When Joey gets out on bail, he hands the disk over to Phreak, who is later arrested, after having hidden the disk himself. Kate retrieves the disk, and asks Dade for help deciphering what was on it. He doesn't want to take that risk, but agrees to make a copy of it for her and Cereal Killer. Later, Plague contacts Dade and threatens to create a false criminal record for his mother if he doesn't hand over the disk. He reluctantly does so, but later joins Kate, Nikon, and Cereal in trying to figure out what was on the disk. They find out about the worm, but only have part of the program on the disk, so they'll have to hack into Ellingson's computer system to find the rest. They get some help from a pair of elite hackers named Razor and Blade, who put out a call for help from other hackers around the world. (This might well be the first hacktivist collective, I'm not sure.) Meanwhile, the Secret Service closes in on the main group of hackers.

And I don't want to spoil any more details, except to say the bad guys lose in the end. (One of the bad guys is an Ellingson executive named Margo, who I guess is dating Plague, but knows nothing about computers, herself.) And I've left out lots of other details throughout the film. I think the movie both took advantage of the public interest in hackers, as well as helping to popularize the idea of hacking. And it makes it clear that while hackers are considered criminals, they're not all bad guys. I want to say that I didn't love Miller's acting in this. I thought he seemed like he was mostly focused on trying to sound American instead of British, and I felt his acting suffered because of it. But I could be wrong. I also kind of feel like the movie could have done without the subplot of romantic tension between Dade and Kate (who was involved with someone else at the time), but I do like the shipping name "Crash and Burn", so I'll let it slide. Anyway... yeah, it was just a fairly fun and exciting movie. And kind of funny, some of which was surely intentional (like, Lillard was probably the most Lillard-y he's ever been). And some of the humor comes in retrospect, like the hackers getting excited about a "high speed" modem that today would be painfully slow. So the movie is very much a product of its time, but it was also sort of prescient (as the article on A.V. Club attests). And I guess I don't know what else to say. But I enjoyed watching it again.