Metacritic Film

Hackers

Starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Fisher Stevens, and Lorraine Bracco

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some sexuality and brief strong language

MGM
Drama  |  Suspense/Thriller
107 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters September 15, 1995

A neophyte "hacker" becomes the target of the FBI after he unknowingly taps into a high-tech embezzling scheme which could cause a horrific environmental disaster in this suspenseful drama. (MGM)

WRITTEN BY
Rafael Moreu

DIRECTED BY
Iain Softley

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

46 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 Chicago Sun-Times
Jolie, the daughter of Jon Voight, and Miller, a British newcomer, bring a particular quality to their performances that is convincing and engaging.
75 USA Today
Recalls the pumped-up energy of "Pump Up the Volume," as well as its casting prowess.
70 Chicago Reader
Without being any sort of miracle, this is an engaging and lively exploitation fantasy-thriller about computer hackers, anarchistic in spirit, that succeeds at just about everything "The Net" failed to--especially in representing computer operations with some visual flair.
50 Washington Post Joe Brown
Separates the tech-savvy boys from the lost-in-cyberspace men. Really--the movie may be too fast and confusingly jargon-choked for everyone but Netsurfers and Webheads.
50 The New York Times
A lot of attention has gone into the film's video games, computer imagery and costumes, to the point where simply watching these artifacts is half the fun...But eventually Hackers turns tedious, perhaps not realizing that an audience can get tired of the same old equations floating in cyberspace.
50 ReelViews
There's not a slowly-paced scene or a dull moment to be found. If nothing else, this film won't bore the average viewer. However, when Hackers has been dissected, what's uncovered beneath the flashy skin is an old-fashioned, film-by-numbers thriller.
50 Austin Chronicle
Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.
50 Austin Chronicle
Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
Want a believable plot or acting? Forget it. But if you just want knockout images, unabashed eye candy and a riveting look at a complex world that seems both real and fake at the same time, "Hackers'' is one of the most intriguing movies of the year.
50 San Francisco Examiner Barbara Shulgasser
The one outstanding ingredient in this exercise is Miller, an English actor who is not only irresistibly adorable and a good actor, but also speaks in a perfect American accent.
50 TV Guide
Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.
50 Variety
There is a great deal more style than substance here. The special effects experts and the other members of the technical crew do their considerable best to give their various hacking sequences the look of warp-speed sci-fi fantasy.
30 Washington Post
Tirelessly modish, hyper-glossy, super-superficial. It's also cacophonous. And, for all of its drum-beating for brain power, dumb.
30 Los Angeles Times David Kronke
All the sound and fury in the world can't disguise the fact that yowling music, typing montages and computer animation do not a gripping finale make. This movie megabytes.
25 Entertainment Weekly
It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.

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