Masterminds (1997)

Masterminds (1997)

Directed by: Roger Christian

Starring: Patrick Stewart, Vincent Kartheiser, Brenda Ficker

If there’s one thing I love, it’s movies with a bunch of hacking sequences in them! And boy howdy, Masterminds has the absolute stupidest hacking sequence I’ve EVER seen in a movie, and I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur. But more about that in paragraph three. OOH! SUSPENSE!

Patrick Stewart is an ex-secret service agent who takes a private school full of rich kids hostage. Everything’s going pretty good for him and his army of gun-toting goons, until an older kid who was walking his sister to school goes up against him… and this kid is a HACKER! A cool hacker, who wears sunglasses and rides a skateboard! Patrick Stewart has no chance against a force like this!!

Yeah, for some reason cops and trained professionals are easily thwarted by the genius Patrick Stewart, but this one kid beats him every time and saves his sister. Ugh. Anyway, back to the bad hacking. At the beginning of the movie, the kid is trying to download a movie, Scream II. Not sure why, but that’s what he’s doing. Now, this hacking takes the form of the kid using a joystick to navigate a Wolfenstein-esque castle. He has to reach the correct door in two minutes, or they’ll track him through his carefully set-up dummy connections. Some of the doors have skeletons and monsters in them, and he’s there, deftly evading the monsters and… he’s downloading a movie. In 1997, didn’t people know enough about computers that they would’ve known how incredibly retarded that is? I know I did. But man, that scene is the funniest thing ever.