"The Net" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL August 5, 1995 As the summer heat wave grinds on there's something nice about ducking into a nice air-conditioned theater on a steamy afternoon and checking out the latest, updated, version of one of Hollywood's oldest stories: innocent hero threatened by murderous evil villain but wins in the end. It's not the plot line that's of interest here, it's the new features in the latest up-grade that you're going to see. In "The Net" old pro director Irwin Winkler manages to spin the tale again in a thoroughly '90s way and, luckily for him, with a thoroughly '90s actor, Sandra Bullock, playing the hero. Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a really good computer analyst, who works free-lance from her home finding the bugs, glitches, and particularly nasty viruses in software programs for big corporate clients who wish she'd come to work for them (and save them all those FedEx charges), but she prefers to work alone in her quiet little house in the Venice (CA) canals district, ordering in pizza via the Internet, and doing computer chat rooms for recreation and human (?) contact. While she can conjure up the description of her ideal man, in fact she's in a pretty unromantic mood, after having concluded a painful relationship with her married, not to mention unethical, shrink. The only person she visits is her mother who has Alzheimer's disease and does not know anymore who Angela is. (It was nice to see a face out of the fifties, Diane Baker, in that role). Unfortunately for Angela, just before she's scheduled to go off to Mexico for a little vacation on the beach, she gets a disk to look at that seems very weird indeed. When you click on a little icon in the lower right hand corner what appears to be a video game instantaneously connects you up with internal computer systems of virtually every known governmental agency in the country, not to mention the hospitals, the police, the air- traffic control system, you name it. Ooops. Not good information to have and before she can get off on her vacation, the one other computer analyst who knows about this disk has been murdered. Angela is next on the list and they turn all their technological talents to erasing her very identity in every computer system she's in: passports, social security, credit cards, etc. and turning her into Ruth Marx, prostitute, drug addict, wanted criminal. Neat, if somewhat incredible, trick. What makes you hang in there and overlook all the logical glitches here (they don't seem to have to use modems or allow time for access numbers to be dialed, for example) is Bullock's portrayal of Angela. It's so nice to see a smart, independent, likeable, courageous woman on the screen (she did this in "Speed" too, but here she needs more brains than she did to drive a bus). And while this is very much the same old standard Hollywood action-adventure film with car chases and nifty camera work, and a killer stalking the hero through the infrastructure of buildings, it is Angela's computer competence and intelligence that win the day, that and an oh-so-symbolic fire extinguisher to the crotch of the hit-man at a crucial moment. Actually, there are two women computer jocks in this film; the bad guys have one, too, who takes on Angela's identity and goes to work for the computer company that wanted to recruit Angela. Though there is, obviously, some violence here, it's minimal as such films go. I'd say, if you and they like this sort of thing, take your daughters. They could do worse than identify with Angela Bennett. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. ***** Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.