“I’m suspicious that the Sandy Bullock bikini scene and the TWO futzing with beautiful hair scenes were added later once someone was like, “Eh, is there stuff I’m supposed to be watching on the screen here?” I bet test audiences were often facing the wrong way, confused by a lack of what is commonly perceived as a movie.
If you’re looking for a “hack the planet,” hilariously 90’s movie about computers and the internet and all that shit, you want to watch Hackers. Possibly the mostly-forgotten Masterminds, which is like Home Alone and Hackers had a baby, and Patrick Stewart did some mustache twirling.
The Net is kind of just a thriller where someone has a thing they shouldn’t have, acquired online, but then most of the movie is kind of a standard chase/thriller thing with no big shocks and nothing to really root for (except Sandy’s hair. Va. Va. Voom. Also, “root,” hair? Eh?).
I would put the hacking time in the movie at something like…4 minutes in total. There is basically one hacking scene, one scene where we’re anxiously waiting for an email to send, and that’s about it.
Dennis Miller makes an appearance as Sandy’s ex lover and ex therapist. I feel like Dennis was an early “Let’s see what happens if we put a comedian in a movie” guy, like trying to take the success of Eddie Murphy and repeat it. I don’t think he’s bad, but like a lot of comedians, he doesn’t exactly disappear into the role. See also: Dennis Leary in Demolition Man.
Maybe it’s a Dennis problem…
All that said, Netflix froze several times while we were watching this movie, and I’m suspicious that the internet didn’t want us to know the secrets and to heed the warnings of The Net. But once we got a little further along in the movie, the internet also decided that this wasn’t really an internet scare film, and it was safe to pump this one out while recording all of our eye twitches in order to generate better content in the future. “