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Review

Much like director Softley's terrific Backbeat, his cyber thriller Hackers has a stimulating visual style to it, but it is there all comparisons end. Neither plausible or exciting, the film stars the sullen Miller as a gifted high school hacker who moves to New York and quickly falls in with fellow and trendy computer nerds. When one of their own accidentally hacks some private and incriminating files, a corporate bad guy (Stevens) and his goons set out to retrieve the disc and frame the kids. This, of course, inspires them to band together, prove their innocence and expose the culprits. In spite of the film's sometimes impressive visuals, Hackers allows its clichéd teen characters' misfit hijinks to substitute for character development -- and ultimately these kids are more hackneyed than hackers.