THE NET. Directed by Irwin Winkler; written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris; produced by Irwin Winkler and Rob Cowan for Columbia. Starring Sandra Bullock. Rated PG-13.
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The Net takes some old-fashioned thriller plot points and dresses them up in the latest technology. It's not a particularly well-constructed suspense movie. But those time-tested tricks are good for few scoots up to the edge of the seat.
Angela (Bullock) has a way with computers and the problems that beset them. She works for a software company, de-bugging games and de-virusing systems. But she works at home in L.A., while the company is in San Francisco. And she spends so much time in front of her (numerous) computer screens that she hardly knows any real people. Except her mother, who is pretty far gone with Alzheimer's.
Sounds like the perfect person who, if some sinister parties needed for her to, could just disappear without a trace. And, of course, that's what almost happens, after she comes into possession of a mysterious but powerful program that said sinister forces don't mind killing to protect.
The old nightmare scenario of how can you prove you're really you? takes on new life in the computer age. How many different computers contain bits information about us? How could we convince the world that all of those bits had been altered, and so much that our lives, our histories now seem belong to someone else?
That's what Angela faces, and that's one of the problems with the movie. Her enemies are made seem so all-powerful, how can she possibly fight them? Making villains too powerful is almost bad a miscalculation as making them too weak.
A more serious problem, though, is the movie's pacing. Some sequences push all the right suspense buttons. But in between are some dead stretches that have you checking your watch.
When it's on, though, The Net is a lot of fun to watch.
As far as my level of computer expertise goes, its techno-babble sounds pretty true to life. (Although who can say how out-of-date it might be by the time it comes out on video?) And Bullock is as spunky and appealing as ever here, although she's considerably less cheerful than she was in, say, Speed. None of her co-stars can match her charisma, but most do a creditable job.
August 9, 1995