The Net

Director Irwin Winkler, who’d previously given us a political movie without politics (Guilty by Suspicion) and a remake of a classic noir without atmosphere or flavor (Night and the City), here gives us a thriller without thrills, though Sandra Bullock in the lead and the putative themethe paranoid possibility of deleting people’s public profiles from computer networksmay keep you intermittently interested. Bullock plays a lonely freelance hacker who accidentally stumbles upon a conspiracy that wipes out her identity during a vacation in Mexico. What’s really terrible here is the script credited to John Brancato and Michael Ferris and apparently written by a computer with identity problems of its own. Winkler doesn’t know how to transcend or circumvent it, and the mechanical music by the omnipresent Mark Isham doesn’t help much. With Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller, and Diane Baker. (JR)

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