I Watched Angelina Jolie's Hackers (1995) For The First Time

Wow, this movie really exists.

Many of you have asked how I've gone my entire life without seeing all these 90s movies I've been writing about lately, and the simple truth is that I was a very sheltered, very closeted, very anxious child and teenager. I spent all of my time playing sports and going to church and crying about how my best friends were constantly betraying me by spending all their time doing tongue-kissing, hand-jobs, etcetera with their stupid boyfriends. And when I wasn't doing that, I was trying to self-diagnose Panic Disorder without the benefit of the internet.

I didn't have a lot of time, or any money really, to sit in a movie theater and watch Helen Hunt chase a bunch of tornadoes around Oklahoma. Which, it turns out, is an even bigger shame than I realized because Helen Hunt in Twister apparently made more than half of you gay. Like, a good 85% of you. I could have been converted into a real and whole living lesbian if I'd just watched it in high school! I could have worn a suit and tie to prom! I could have kissed other basketball players! I could have sung Melissa Etheridge from the live radio, crooning about "Come to my window…" while standing outside a girl's window! 

Instead I was just, like, quoting Shakespeare — "For God's sake let us sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories" — and practicing free throws. Anyhoodle, the point is that I recently watched Angelina Jolie in Hackers (1995) for the first time, and wow, this movie really exists. 

I’ve been to the future. They call it a Face Card.

Hackers is a film about five teenage hackers who go to the same high school in New York City and get framed for a cyberterrorist attack that aims to unleash a global ecological catastrophe upon the world’s oceans, which is really just a cover for a grown-up hacker named The Plague to transfer all the money he's been stealing from a giant oil company where he's posing as the IT guy, which is being enabled by the United States Secret Service as a PR ploy. And if you think that sounds convoluted, wait'll I tell you that the new kid at school is actually ZERO COOL, the child hacker who got arrested for corporate espionage at age eight and was convicted and banned from even touching a computer for ten years. THAT Zero Cool.

The other teen hackers don't know their new friend, Dade, is Zero Cool. They know him as Crash Override. Dade falls in love with Angelina Jolie on the first day of school. She's got the dyke-iest haircut anyone's ever seen, like she went into the salon and plopped down and said, "Make it severe." She's always wearing a Formula 1 leather jacket that she only takes off to put on various pieces of denim outerwear or professional sports jerseys. Her eye makeup doesn't know if it's the 80s or 90s. She spends her free time getting all the high scores on a first person shooter at the place where the hacker youths hang out after school, which is some kind of rollerblade park dance club arcade snack bar warehouse. 

She also owns a laptop with a "28.8bps modem with an active matrix display that has like a million RGB colors." (For reference, that’ll have you downloading an entire low-res JPEG in less than ten minutes!)

Ah, Carmen Sandiego’s fashion inspo revealed at last.

Angelina Jolie's whole vibe in this movie is full-on bisexual space assassin. Or, like, cyberpunk elf princess. But actually! Angelina Jolie is a hacker too! And her name is Acid Burn, motherfuckers. 

When Dade (and yes, that's D-A-D-E, like what the cats on Twitter call their fathers) finds out about Angelina Jolie being Acid Burn, he decides to challenge her to a HACK OFF, which is some kind of competition where they take turns doing hacker pranks, like getting the head of the Secret Service Cybersecurity arrested, and getting his credit card declined, and placing a fetish-y personal ad in the newspaper with his work phone number. 

Mmm-hmm: A whole other plot to complement the ecoterrorism plot, the frame job plot, the corporate heist plot, the ambitiously devious Secret Service politician plot, and the childhood trauma plot. You're probably thinking, "Wow, with a runtime of one hour and forty-seven minutes, and all these storylines, this movie must be jam-packed with action." No, guys! Fifty percent of this movie is just: graphics of the various hackers' faces traveling down phone lines and through mainframes, sending each other the most flaccid threats via MS Paint images that say things like, "Mess with the best, die like the rest." And, "You have tread upon my domain and must now suffer."

Sometimes there's even stock footage of sword fights and trains running off the rails  and Wild West shoot-outs to really drive home the point that even though we can only see the hackers sitting there smashing F3 on their keyboard over and over again, actually they are in a fight for their lives! 

Acid Burn’s Two Dads

Angelina Jolie is completely unabashed about exploring her queerness in this movie. For starters, she tells Dade she'll go out with him if he wears a dress, and it's not like those 90s movies and TV shows where they put women in a dress for laughs. Like, Angelina Jolie full-on sex dreams about Dade in that dress. However, she will not be wearing a dress, because she doesn't DO dresses and she also doesn't DO dates. She writes misandrist poetry on the chalkboard during AP English. Her mentors are this gay couple who are hackers and who live backstage at a night club and who also have a local access TV show that's sort of Lilly Tells It Like Is meets Twitch. Oh — I forgot to tell you: Obviously, Angelina Jolie also drives a motorcycle. 

And, actually, the funniest thing I know about Hackers now is that when they started marketing the movie in 1995, all the actors had equal prominence on the posters, but after like one week in the theater, all the posters became one huge Angelina Jolie face with four nerds behind her. The tagline on the Hackers posters stayed the same, though. It was: "Their only crime was curiosity." 

Which is a BALDFACED LIE. These teens commit enough felonies to go to jail FOREVER. I'm talking, like, copyright infringement, cyber harassment, cyberstalking, phishing, planting malware, planting ransomware, intellectual property theft, identity theft, theft theft, breaking and entering, trespassing, vandalism, unauthorized government communication surveillance, turning off all the traffic lights in NYC and causing a gazillion dollars worth of property damage, and, at one point, Angelina Jolie shoots a random security guard with a flare gun! Right at his face! A flare gun!

Luckily, everything gets resolved in an intense montage of Angelina Jolie's gays coming together to HACK THE PLANET. They all start sending viruses to The Plague’s computers! Endless viruses! He screams and cries and tries to run away in a disguise like Scooby-Doo, but gets nabbed by the Feds.

HACKING.

The kids do get arrested where they're staging all this chaos, at one of the payphone kiosks at Grand Central Station — but Matthew Lillard goes on TV and also onto the screens in Times Square to reveal that actually THE PLAGUE is to blame for all the mess. He's the one who framed Acid Burn and Crash Override, he's the one who's been stealing all that money off the oil company, and he's the one who should be arrested anyway, even if those things weren't true, because earlier, unironically, he said the phrase, "We're the cyber samurais. We're the keyboard cowboys." Jail for one million years for The Plague. 

Dade and Angelina Jolie go on their date. She wears a sci-fi dress with Doc Martens, but tells him he'd look better in the outfit. He doesn’t seem to fully understand that she’s for real. She wants to HACK THE PLANET and fuck with gender, man. Grow up. Luckily, for Acid Burn, she'll be off to college next year and Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be starting up on The WB, so she should get this whole thing figured out pretty soon.