"The Net" Review

 In 1995 a pair of movies came out starring Sandra Bullock, fresh off her appearance in the previous year's Speed, which caused me to coin the term "Sandra Bullock Syndrome" which is when a move expects the audience to believe a perfectly attractive woman can't seem to attract the attention of a man. (I've seen others use this term on teh Intartoobz meaning great minds think alike or something, but I made it up.) One was While You Were Sleeping where Bullock pined for Peter Gallagher while ignoring THE archetypical Decent Guy Who Has No Real Flaws But Is A Little Dull So Women Ignore Him For The Bad Boy Bill Pullman. The other was tonight's movie, The Net, which along with Hackers the same year were many Normies introduction to the existence of the recently invented World Wide Web. Unlike the latter Angelina Jolie flick, the representation of tech in The Net is fairly rooted in reality. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a slow-paced slog.

Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a freelance computer analyst living in Venice, CA. She rebuffs attempts to meet people in real life, orders pizza online from Pizza-dot-net (which amazingly isn't a real site now, not even cybersquatted), and visiting her Alzheimer's-stricken mother who doesn't remember her. She doesn't even have a cat. (Wha??)

A tech colleague mails her a floppy disc - 'memba those? - that has a hidden feature which appears to give hackers access to government servers, airlines, power grid controls, all sorts of things you don't want malicious actors to have access to, but when he flies his Cessna to meet her to discuss it, his plane's navigation malfunctions and he crashes to death.

Angela goes on vacation to Mexico and attracts the attention of a British man, Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northham), who also takes a fancy laptop to the beach. While she's shy at first, she succumbs to his vanilla charms so that the movie could happen beginning with his staging a purse snatching then, after boinking her on his boat, attempting to murder kill her for the disc. Ruh-roh! She manages to escape on the boat's dinghy, but wrecks and is knocked unconscious for three days.

When she goes to the Embassy to get a temporary visa to get home, since her documents were stolen, she's presented a form with the name Ruth Marx on it. They ignore her protestations that she was Angela Bennett, so she signs the wrong name to get home. Except when she gets to her house, she finds it empty except for the real estate agent selling it. The cops are called when the neighbors can't vouch for her since they never interacted with her and while she's trying to explain who she is, Jack hacks the police database to add a criminal record to "Ruth's" file making her a felon fugitive.

She escapes the cops and is on the run to reclaim her life, turning to a former lover, her therapist Dr. Alan Champion (a woefully miscast Dennis Miller). Hijinks ensure as she tries to reclaim her life and stop the conspiracy Jack's masters, the Praetorians, are perpetrated to gain control over everything.

While a few of the specifics of the tech of the mid-1990s are BS, a lot of what The Net portrays is actually reasonably plausible with her using a Macintosh, not something running MovieOS. But it's weird revisiting one of these conspiracy thrillers that were so common in the Nineties, especially in the slooooooooow pacing where it takes about a half-hour to get the plot going, stuff that would've been chopped down to a tight 10 minutes nowadays.

Director Irwin Winkler is better known for his long career as a producer - he was nominated for Best Picture for Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and Goodfellas, winning for Rocky (over Network, booooo!!!) - than as a director and The Net is a good example of why some people should just hire competent people to make their movies.

Screenwriters John Brancato & Michael Ferris would follow this bland story with the wildly overrated The Game (which has one of the worst endings ever, but is given a pass because David Fincher directed and until it faceplants it was an OK movie) then real winners like Catwoman. The irony is that the kernel of an idea at the core - that all our information is online and unless we secure it bad things will happen - is sound, even prescient, but the tepid potwarmer of a plot doesn't land.

At the center of this mediocrity is poor Bullock, trying her best with weak material and direction, eking out some sympathy because she's just so darn cute. But there are other, far better, movies with Nineties Bullock in them like Demolition Man, Speed, and Miss Congeniality. 

Score: 4/10. Skip it.