The Net (1995)

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, Alex takes a journey back to the days when AOL was king and that dial-up noise would soothe the soul. This is The Net. And it has a perfectly cheesy trailer.

Overview: The movie opens with the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense receiving distressing news and having his driver take him about town to clear his head. After calling his wife and kid on his giant 90s cell phone and apologizing for having to work late, the man calmly loads a revolver and kills himself in a park. The significance of this is left unexplained for about 80 minutes (and is ultimately kind of inconsequential for something the movie spends so much time setting up).

We then cut to the main character of our movie, a lonely yet sexy computer analyst named Angela Bennett, played competently by Sandra Bullock. She's debugging a copy of Doom that has a nasty virus, and afterwards turns down an offer of dinner from her fat cat corporate boss to order pizza and lurk on chat rooms. The movie even shows her calling up a fireplace screensaver on another monitor, and overall you get the sense this young woman is lonely but secure in her lifestyle. I'll get back to what I thought about this scene later in the review.

Disaster soon strikes as Angela comes into possession of a floppy disk (remember, 90s) containing some kind of super-hacking tool that a shadowy group called the Praetorians want to get their hands on. After a whirlwind romance in Cancun with a suave British assassin named Jack Devlin, Angela is thrust into a world of intrigue and danger as the bad guys steal her identity and give her the assumed one of Ruth Marx, a troubled young woman with multiple arrests for drug use and prostitution. Since she's such a hermit, none of her neighbors can vouch for who she actually is. Her only friends are online, and her only family is her elderly mother with Alzheimer's who can't often remember who Angela is (although we are shown Angela visits her often). Basically, everything is set up so ID theft seems pretty easy, but the bad guys manipulate her records on the fly so often that it becomes cartoonish.

and now we just overclock the floppy drive and reverse the hard drive's polarity, brilliant!

Angela enlists help from a variety of friends who all get quickly murdered by the Praetorians and, of course, our heroine eventually wins the day through her cunning and computer skills, leading to a sickeningly sweet ending where everything is wonderful.

Notable moments/quotes: Jack, indicating the laptop Angela brought to the beach: "Is this business or pleasure?"
Angela: "There a difference?"
Card rank above 10: "Is if you're a hacker."

Jack: "Bet [your ex-boyfriend] was the captain of the drinking team. Wasn't ready for a relationship."
Angela: "Wish I was that lucky... he was my shrink. I thought I was lonely and he forgot he was married. And then my mom got Alzheimer's and... I'm sorry."

Shortly after the above exchange, Jack reveals his true colors when he throws Angela's pie-in-the-sky standards she said she had for a guy on a chat room earlier in her face and draws a silenced pistol. He goes for the shot, but our clever heroine emptied the clip first. She takes a page from the classics and knocks the British baddie out with a wine bottle.

At one point, Angela learns the real names, addresses, and age of her chatroom friends with a simple WHOIS command. She uses this to reach out to a local chat buddy and meet him IRL. However, the bad guys get to her would-be ally first, because the dumbass has a sticker of his chat avatar next to his call button in his apartment building.

"Maybe DEATH is just a cool club name or something"

At one point, Angela gives an extended rant about how everything about our lives are all on computers. She's mad as hell at this point, sounding like a Luddite advocating an escape from technology of this sort. This comes off as preachy as well as ironic, because Angela is only able to overcome the villains with her computer skills. (A well-timed press of the ESC key somehow fucks up their entire conspiracy for reasons that only vaguely hinted at.)

At one point, the bad guys send a fake FBI agent to claim Angela. She sees through the deception when he knows more than he should, and after a battle in the car he's driving, Angela just so happens to swerve it right into where Jack is parked. Never mind that Jack could have been coordinating his hacking and the tailing of Angela from anywhere; of course he'd park in a car along the route his agent was taking!

Late in the movie, Angela sneaks into her company's office, where the real Ruth Marx is impersonating her (since Angela telecommuted, natch) and does the hacker equivalent of pulling a fire alarm. This causes everyone to clear out, but nobody locks their computers or makes any effort to ensure information security. At my office, the whole floor would have been super fired for that, but here apparently nobody gives a shit about protecting corporate secrets.

My thoughts: I mentioned earlier that Angela's introduction scene was effective, and I'd like to expand on that. This scene actually resonated with me; although this movie is now 20 years old, it portrays the kind of lifestyle I think quite a few people lead these days. My hobbies as well as my job involve long hours of staring at screens and spending time alone; while it can be lonely, it's a loneliness that's chosen rather than forced, and for an introverted person like myself, it's useful to have so much access to information, entertainment, and yes, socializing through the Internet. Yet while the movie seems to take the stance that this kind of isolation is bad (i.e. Angela's hikikomori
lifestyle allows the baddies to impersonate her without anyone really being able to attest otherwise), I disagree.

Growing up, I was a very shy kid, and I struggled to make friends. It seemed difficult to connect with others, so I naturally fell into the hobbies of reading, video games, etc. However, once I started to use the Internet (and to a lesser extent, a cell phone), that level of separation and anonymity from the people I talked to emboldened me. I credit technologies like these that the movie in part demonizes for helping me to work through my social awkwardness and anxieties. (Some experience in theatre didn't hurt, either.)

In any case, for something of a B movie, there's a little quality to the writing here. While the dialogue is pretty wooden and stiff and the direction poor, the plot can be entertaining to watch unfold to see what ridiculous lengths the bad guys go to to ensure they can triumph. This brings up another issue, however, in that the bad guys really don't have any kind of agency, or at least not one the movie tells us about. They aren't in it for the money, because they hack the NYSE at one point but don't appear to profit. They don't seem to have any kind of political agenda, as their ringleader only seems to be interested in letting his group... do more bad hacker things. Or something. Sorry, movie, but when you're already at such a level of idiocy, I can't accept a massive secret organization able to rapidly carry out assassinations and impersonate FBI agents as having a "watch the world burn" goal. It worked in Dark Knight because the Joker is demonstrably crazy as well as being just one man, but when the movie's villains are a well-organized, professional group that appears to be made up of people who are just evil, not crazy, the premise becomes just a little too unstable for my suspension of disbelief to handle.

In summary, if all you want is a dumb spy thriller and are willing to turn off the part of your brain that knows about computers, you might like this movie. Jeremy Northam also plays the creepy assassin Jack with just the right amount of stiff upper lip. It's really a joy to watch him alternate between wanting to kill Angela and wanting to pork her with equal amounts of classy British sleaze. The other performances are serviceable, but once again the villain is clearly having the most fun.

I give this movie a Nic Cage Reasons With Kidnappers out of five.

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