Hackers (1995)

There is something almost touching about a 1995 studio thriller that believed the future belonged to teenagers with acoustic couplers and rollerblades. Iain Softley's Hackers follows Dade Murphy, banned from a keyboard until his eighteenth birthday, as he falls in with a Manhattan crew of handle-bearing misfits and stumbles onto an embezzlement scheme run by a former hacker turned corporate security man. The film was received coolly, finished fourth in its opening weekend, and has since been canonized by people who were not alive when it came out. Time has been kinder to the soundtrack than to the plot.

The social consciousness here is real but modest, and it arrives mostly through casting and quotation. The crew is a deliberately mixed ensemble, Puerto Rican, Black, white, assembled without a word of comment, and the Hacker Manifesto is recited over the opening titles with its promise of a world without skin color or nationality. Angelina Jolie's Acid Burn out-hacks the male lead and settles the rivalry on merit, which for 1995 is a quietly radical piece of business. Against this sits a sturdy anti-corporate streak: Ellingson Mineral, a corrupt officer, twenty-five million dollars skimmed from the books, and a climactic broadcast in which the kids expose the whole arrangement on live television. The film sides with the outsiders against the institution, and it does so with the enthusiasm of a punk zine, not a policy paper.

What it never does is lecture. The rousing statements are brief, the sermonizing is confined to a manifesto quoted once and a closing speech delivered from a rooftop, and the rest is a caper. No LGBTQ threads, no body-image discourse, no climate argument, no historical revision. The oil tankers exist to be capsized as a cover story. It is an exploitation picture with good hair, and it knows it.