Incredibly boneheaded techno thriller, but it's so goony it ends up being quite entertaining. A group of teens (among them an incredibly nubile Angelina Jolie with a darling pixie cut) are expert hackers, but they're up against an even more powerful evil hacker (Fisher Stevens) who is trying to frame them for a crime he is going to commit. Jonny Lee Miller is the male lead, a notorious hacker from a young age. Among others, Matthew Lillard also co-stars, and is as annoying as always. But, really, every character here is quite annoying, so he doesn't grate too much. The film gets by mostly on its weird, actually kind of fun aesthetics. Computer visualizations are always stupid, and, in a movie from 1995, they're going to look even more stupid to a modern audience. The costumes are particularly amazing. One might be tempted to say that this movie is incredibly '90s in its style, but, really, no one in the 1990s ever dressed or spoke like this. It's like a film slightly outside of time. I think the director wanted it to seem slightly futuristic. Instead it's just slightly crazy.
