This technology-focused variation on the heist genre isn’t the most well reviewed film so it’s not one for the ages. Nevertheless it is something of a cult classic featuring a stellar cast and a reasonably plausible take on security penetration. Despite the serious stakes involved and plenty of outright murder, the film mostly has a light tone and indeed the cast and crew, including director Phil Alden Robinson, seemed to have had a lot of fun making it. That kind of carries over and makes this a highly entertaining caper.

Martin Brice, who was a hacker in his youth, now runs a security penetration testing company with a crew of varied backgrounds and talents. One day he is approached by a pair of men from the NSA who want to hire him to acquire a device made by a mathematician Gunter Janek and threaten to expose his criminal past unless he complies. They explain that they have to go through him as it is illegal for the NSA to conduct domestic operations. The team acquires the device easily enough by breaking into Janek’s home but also realize that the device is capable of defeating virtually every form of encryption in the US. The next day Martin goes to handover the device to the NSA agents. However one of his crew, Donald Crease, himself a former CIA operative, sees in the news that Janek is dead. He realizes that these two men must have killed him and that they are not NSA at all and so the crew is in a whole lot of trouble.

The traditional crew recruitment scene is skipped here by having them being an established team but their eclectic skillset and how well they work together is still the best part of the film for me. Crease is the only one who seems capable of some fighting and knows how the alphabet agencies operate. The one nicknamed Mother is their technician and also a conspiracy theorist. Carl is their young hacker and the blind Whistler is a phone phreak who is able to listen to subtle sonic cues. Unfortunately the one female character of note is Liz as Martin’s ex-girlfriend and so the film uses her in the old-fashioned sexist role of the seducer. There are the usual simplifications and visual nonsense, such as how no public interface for computer networks actually looks like that, but on the whole we can see from the setup that they have done some research and this is actually a fairly reasonable take on the hacking scene of the time. Whistler’s incredible hearing acuity is highly exaggerated but their exploits are a lot of fun to watch and I really enjoyed how the team really do cooperate with one another to cover all of the different aspects of the job.

The film is kind of weak when it comes to the wider geopolitical picture as being able to break US encryption should be a far bigger deal than it seems here. Also who cares about the device itself when it is the algorithm that matters? I’m also amused that made as it was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, it presents Russians as being less bad than the US security establishment or even Republicans in general. There’s a bit of running joke throughout of stealing money from right-wing assholes to give to Socialist causes which feels very dated now. It’s been a long time since hackers were seen as being heroic figures.

Overall this is an entertaining enough film and it’s fun to see all these big name stars together. Still even in 1992, Robert Redford looked too old for his role and was clearly cast only for his star power and River Phoenix didn’t have much to do as Carl either. But this is no great work of cinema and will eventually be of interest only to those curious about the hacking scene of this era.