Hackers (1995) – Review

Rocky Balboa once said that time is undefeated and nothing gives the passing of years more of a tactical advantage than a film the revels in its own time period. But while big hair and shoulder pads exposes the 80s just as much as comfortable leisurewear and pompadours did the 50s, there’s something extra amusing at how time is examining the 90s. High on the list of offenders is Iain Softley’s Hackers, a teen thriller that not only joined the growing ranks of films that insisted that watching people type was exciting, but that fully embraced the alternative lifestyles of the time with all the bizarre hair choices and extravagant fashion accessories that went with it.
Severely dating itself the very second someone switched on a mid-90s era PC, these days Hackers has a lot of work to do when it comes to avoiding being an utter relic of its time – but once we get past the gaudy visuals and forgotten slang, is Hackers’ central code truly as dated as it seems?

In 1988, at the tender age of eleven, Dade Murphy managed to hack and crash 1,507 computer systems and cause a seven point drop in the Stock Exchange under his online alias, “Zero Cool”, and as a result, he got his family fined a whopping $45,000 and he was banned from using a computer or a touch-tone phone until he turns eighteen. Seven years pass and when his ban lifts on his eighteenth birthday, we find him and his mother have moved to New York and he’s about to start his first day at his new school.
Trying to play down his pre-teen criminal record, he still starts getting up to a few of his old tricks on-line and soon falls in with a crowd of eccentric hackers that all boast incredibly hyperbolic code names. But while the likes of The Phantom Phreak (Ramon), Cereal Killer (Emmanuel), Lord Nikon (Paul) and Joey all welcome him into their tech-obsessed world, the sultry and tough Kate Libby (aka. Acid Burn) keeps Dade (newly christened Crash Override) at a distrustful arm’s length after previously clashing with him online under their hacker identities.
However, when their youngest member accidently hacks into a supercomputer owned by the Ellingson Mineral Corporation and inadvertently stumbles on a plot to embezzle $25 million by former hacker turned computer security officer, The Plague (aka. Eugene Belford) who plans to blame the whole thing on hackers and frame them for domestic terrorism. With everyone under surveillance by the secret service, the youthful team of on-line outlaws realise that they’re going to have to step in and save the day if they’re going to prevent the smug Belford from getting what he wants and keep them all out of federal prison. The Plague can easily outclass any one of them, but an army of hackers? They can achieve the impossible, be it bringing the Plague down or even getting Dade to score a date with Kate.

I’ll put my hands up; even those who lived through the nineties might find Hackers too overwhelmingly dated to take even remotely seriously, as virtually every shot in every scene contains something that’s so painfully of its time, I’d suggest that you avoid partaking in fluids while watching it in order to reduce the chance of choking or spit takes. The hair, the attitudes, the music and some of the most brain melting 90s fashions you’re ever likely to experience all come together to create a snapshot of alt-90s culture that stubbonly refuses to pull any punches. However, if you can muscle through the sight of around a third of the cast insisting on wearing weirdly tiny sunglasses indoors, there’s a lot about Hackers that proudly holds up – not least because a lot of its ideas, themes and notions suddenly became common knowledge thanks to a little film called The Matrix.
If you strip Hackers of a lot of its refinery, it’s actually doing a lot of thing that other, culture dependent, movies do and that’s go all in on replicating and then glamourising the look, speech and lifestyles of these people while making look as desirable to “normies” as it possibly can. Much like Point Break threw us into the deep end of surfing culture and adrenaline junkies and The Fast And The Furious exposed us to burnt rubber smell of the world of street racing, Hackers grabs us by our clothes and enthusiastically rubs our faces into hacker culture as it’s outlandishly hip cast discuss monitor resolution and refresh rates with excitement usually reserved for Quentin Tarantino working at a pedicurist. Everyone travels everywhere on rollerblades or skateboards, and while it may seem amusing to mock the fashions, a vast majority of the looks are – in some variation or another – still quite evocative of alt-culture today.

What also help immensely is the assorted cast who try to give the assorted oddballs, weirdos and outcasts the exact same type of worship you’d find in something like Empire Records, only they’re also squashing white collar crime while they’re at it. Johnny Lee Miller does his best with bleached hair and a noticably looped accent as his story arc starts somewhere near Karate Kid with keystrokes and ends amusingly close to Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift – but while anyone who’s more familiar with the actor thanks to Trainspotting might discover that they find Miller a little out of place, Angelina Jolie seems born to play her role as she smolders from under her pixie cut like some sort of feral, feminist elf. Adding to the fun and seemingly getting the vibe far more than the rest of the cast combined is a pre-Scream Matthew Lillard who not only rocks braids and spouts lines like “We have just gotten a wake-up call from the Nintendo Generation”, he is miraculously not excruciatingly annoying, which is more that can be said for the movie’s villains. While our heroes yell “Hack the planet” and the director tries to find fluid, eye-catching ways to visualise something quite banal (cue the camera whooshing through city block-sized computer components and trippy, screensaver-esque views of code floating through the air). Some of it works better than others, but Fisher Stevens’ egocentric villain and Lorraine Bracco’s insanely ignorant superior feel like they’ve tumbled right out of a Joel Schumacher Batman movie – sure, Iain Softley is trying to keep things light, but how am I supposed to take the Plague seriously when he dramatically enters a scene on a skateboard while being pulled along by a limousine?

Very much a creature of its time, Hackers will no doubt be quaint for some and utterly ludicrous to others who can’t move past the bombastic 1995 vibe (those who are more likely to hack up their lungs rather than the plane), but those who can read between the lines and appreciate a heartfelt – and frequently fairly silly – attempt to give a voice to the voiceless will probably attest that the film has thoroughly earned every shred of its cult status. There’s other, better teen films to be sure, but this is a return to a far simpler time when all you needed to change the world was a modem and a pair of rollerblades…
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