I've always just said Hackers is a comedy whether or not they knew they were making a comedy.
Sneakers is a drama and might as well be a documentary except for two scenes, which I'll accept would've bored audiences to tears if they weren't graphicalized.
I love the idea that Hackers is actually self-aware, but I think it’s more of a ‘The Room’ situation; where retroactively we can view it as a comedy and find some appreciation for an otherwise almost inexcusably awful piece of film.
I would’ve been like…10(?) when it came out, so having seen it for the first time only a couple years ago (I’m 32 now) - it was just a hilarious experience I could never imagine having been taken seriously, even when it was made.
It seems to be a movie about hackers made by people who have never actually used a computer.
Late on the followup here, but yeah. What I observed at the time is that Hackers had a decidedly bimodal reception. There were folks who thought it was the most k-rad depiction of real leet hackers ever to hit the screen, and there were folks who rolled their eyes and wondered if the filmmakers even realized it was a parody of itself.
And the two groups barely realized each other existed.
I've gone back and watched Hackers recently (actually there was a 25th anniversary retrospective with some of the original actors on Twitch, kind of fun) and I still can't watch the whole thing, it's just uncomfortably bad. Has a few golden lines -- "it's in that place where I put that thing that time" remains a favorite -- but overall it's just one Sandra Bullock away from being the worst tech film ever.
Sneakers is a drama and might as well be a documentary except for two scenes, which I'll accept would've bored audiences to tears if they weren't graphicalized.