DIRECTOR
Irwin Winkler

SCREENWRITER
John Brancato
Michael Ferris

PRODUCERS
Rob Cowan
Irwin Winkler

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jack N. Green

MUSIC
Mark Isham

EDITOR
Richard Halsey

CAST

Sandra Bullock (Angela Bennett)
Jeremy Northam (Jack Devlin)
Dennis Miller (Dr. Alan Champion)
Diane Baker (Mrs. Bennett)
Ken Howard (Bergstrom)

MPAA rating: PG-13
Running time: 114m
U.S. release: July 28, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD

DIRECTOR
Brett Leonard

SCREENWRITER
Eric Bernt

PRODUCERS
Gary Lucchesi

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Gale Tattersall

MUSIC
Christopher Young

EDITORS
Rob Kobrin
B.J. Sears

CAST

Denzel Washington (Parker Barnes)
Kelly Lynch (Dr. Madison Carter)
Russell Crowe (Sid 6.7)
Stephen Spinella (Dr. Lindenmeyer)
William Forsythe (William Cochran)
Louise Fletcher (Commissioner Deane)
William Fichtner (Wallace)
Kevin J. O'Connor (Clyde Reilly)
Traci Lords (Media Zone Singer)

MPAA rating: R
Running time: 106m
U.S. release: August 4, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD

The true test of a movie star is how adroitly he or she can put across a far-fetched thriller. Cary Grant and James Stewart in their Hitchcock movies are the classic examples; recent examples might be Harrison Ford in The Fugitive and Jodie Foster in, yes, The Silence of the Lambs (a gripping story brilliantly told, but c'mon, think about it for a few minutes). And in The Net, Sandra Bullock, the most confident and exuberant new American star in ages, guides you past the many bumps in the plot. Playing a lonely computer whiz who yearns for contact yet fears it, Bullock takes you directly inside the movie's paranoid heart. That's what a star can do for a thriller: bring out its subtext, which touches on our common anxieties rather than just putting us through the dumb stress of watching bad guys stalk good guys.

Bullock has been called the new Julia Roberts, but the comparison insults both actresses, who each have their own style. Julia Roberts often exudes waiflike fragility; she makes you feel protective. Sandra Bullock, a relatively tiny woman compared with the leggy Roberts, is vulnerable but not easily breakable. She's also an innately funny actress. In Demolition Man, Bullock played a 21st-century cop smitten with the tough pulp of the 20th century. Attempting to show off her command of old-time cop slang, she proudly suggested, "Let's go in there and blow them." ("Blow them away," Sylvester Stallone corrected.) Bullock delivered the line so innocently, as if she sincerely thought that was the right expression, that a potentially lame joke was transformed into wit. And her career so far has been full of moments like that.

The Net, directed by Irwin Winkler (Night and the City), is a pressure-cooker trust-nobody thriller in the tradition of Marathon Man and The Parallax View. Bullock is Angela Bennett, a program analyst who sniffs out computer viruses and banishes them. Or something like that. The movie doesn't bury you in cyberbabble; it's friendly to computer newbies -- maybe too much so. The Net has already provoked grumbling from cybernerds: The plot turns on a medical file, which in fact is not accessible on the Net. And when Angela stumbles onto this incriminating file and some bad guys start chasing her and systematically deleting every computerized trace of her identity, you'd do well to remember that computers aren't that omniscient yet.

The key word is yet. The Net works terrifically well as a cautionary thriller about where technology is headed. All of us are already, to a large degree, reduced to numbers. And nobody really knows what exactly the Internet is, or will be, capable of. It's a highly controversial medium in its infancy (nobody has agreed on proper Net regulations, for instance), and that's what makes it fertile soil for a thriller. The premise -- an average person's life is stripped away by a relentless group of crypto-fascists -- is right out of Kafka, who would have known what to make of the Net. Irwin Winkler isn't Kafka, but in The Net's best moments he comes within shouting distance of Hitchcock. Winkler hasn't made a movie for techies; he uses the Net's informational access as his MacGuffin -- the thing that sets the plot in motion, the thing the heroine has and the villains will kill to get.

The Net is a good, sturdy nail-biter with neo-Luddite undercurrents of dread. Barcodes, disks, even televisions and phones become talismans of evil used against Angela. And as she gets deeper into trouble, Winkler frames her inside doorways, looking out of windows, shoehorned between people, peering through cracks; the compositions (by Jack N. Green, Clint Eastwood's usual cinematographer) box Angela in, so that she always seems trapped inside a computer screen. It's telling that the film's tense climax finds her seated in a cubicle. And in the last shot, Angela tends flowers with her Alzheimer's-stricken mother (Diane Baker). The camera pulls back, and Angela -- now spending time with a human with imperfect memory, rather than with a computer with megabytes of memory -- is restored to herself in a nice, comfortable long shot, surrounded by nature. The Net is more than a trendy cyberthriller; it yearns for simpler days, when we sat down and wrote letters instead of sending e-mail, chatted on the phone instead of in chat rooms, actually went out and made real live friends.

Oh, how I wanted to like Virtuosity. Even after seeing the trailer, which made it look like an extended chase scene (the trailer, it turns out, is accurate), I let myself get psyched about seeing two of my favorite actors: Denzel Washington, who was so crackerjack in Crimson Tide earlier this summer, and Kelly Lynch, whose post-Drugstore Cowboy career hasn't blossomed as it deserves to. Plus there was Russell Crowe as the movie's villain, Sid 6.7. Crowe has been in movies for a few years (he was superb in the Australian Proof, from 1992), but his star is only now beginning to climb; he was the young gay hero of The Sum of Us, and his first shot at an American crossover, The Quick and the Dead, didn't make it. Which puts me in the odd position of recommending Virtuosity, a fundamentally lame movie. But if lots of you don't go see it, Crowe will have to wait that much longer to snag bigger, better international roles.*

Sid 6.7 is a virtual-reality serial killer, part of an experimental training program for cops; his evil-genius programmer decides to unleash Sid onto the real world. Enter Denzel, as Parker Barnes, an ex-cop turned convict (he went nuts and killed innocent people in the process of dispatching a psycho who'd blown up his wife and child). Barnes is the only one who can catch Sid, because Sid's psyche is made up of dozens of hardcores, including the mad dog who killed Barnes' family. So Barnes is let out of jail, with a micro-something implanted in his neck to track his moves (thanks, but I already saw Escape from New York). And that's the movie. The composite-psycho premise is interesting; too bad nothing much is done with it. Sid should be fractured and schizo, but he's just a superpsycho.

Director Brett Leonard has been down this cyber-road before, in his debut, The Lawnmower Man, another "look at the pretty computer-generated pictures" snooze. Virtuosity isn't an obscure hipster mess like Johnny Mnemonic; a couple of the action sequences have a crisp, aggressive snap. But after about half an hour I failed to see the difference between this movie and fifty other cop-chases-killer videos I usually don't want to rent. Washington may have taken the role so he'd get to play a dynamic, uncomplicated guy who runs and jumps and shoots -- these days every serious actor seems to get Hamlet out of the way early and drive right into Stallone country -- but he gives a one-note performance, and Kelly Lynch, as some sort of fancy psychologist attached to the v-r program, mostly tags along and weeps after Sid kidnaps her little daughter.

Russell Crowe is the only reason to watch. Looking uncannily like Bret Easton Ellis (a good joke in itself), Crowe turns in the sort of witty, raring-to-go psycho performance that magnetizes the camera and makes you wish he were in a movie that deserves him. Sid turns the world into his sadistic playpen; like David Warner's Jack the Ripper in Time After Time and Charles Dance's villain in Last Action Hero, Sid is alert to the endless lovely possibilities of his new stomping grounds. And, after getting blown away so many times in virtual reality, he's tickled by the idea of payback. This is all in Crowe's performance, because his dialogue is long on the callous, cheesy one-liners screenwriters always try to pass off as malevolent wit. If he doesn't break out in this dumb movie aimed at cybernerds and jocks, he may have to do it in a movie that aims higher -- but only if Hollywood gives him the chance.

* As it turned out, Crowe had to wait another five years. Between 1995 and 2000, Crowe made a variety of movies big and small -- seven in all -- and none of them worked for him, not even the good ones. He gave a powerhouse performance in L.A. Confidential that not enough people saw; he gave a blistering performance in The Insider that even fewer people saw, though it got him an Oscar nomination. (In an odd coincidence, he found himself pitted against former screen adversary Denzel Washington for Best Actor that year. Neither man won. Odder still, he and Denzel faced off against each other again in the 2001 Oscar race -- thus making Virtuosity an interesting Oscar footnote in retrospect.) Not until Gladiator in 2000 -- ironically, a role any beefcake could have played -- did Crowe finally become the toast of Hollywood (and an Oscar-winner) after a decade of working in films.