Hacker thrillers were at their peak in the ’90s, when they provided a sometimes-outlandish, sometimes-prescient peek, often-cheesy at the possible techno-future that awaited us. Wardriver is a hacker movie with roots in the noir genre, and it wasn’t perceived as holding much audience interest, at least not based on its paltry theatrical release last spring. But now it’s ascended the charts on Paramount+ as people discover it at home. Is this a revitalization of the subgenre, or just another cheesy computer movie?
WARDRIVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Cole (Dane DeHaan) is a skilled hacker putting his skills by poaching wi-fi signals, grabbing bank information, and emptying bank accounts — usually businesses’ rather than individuals — for his personal gain (though maybe less gain than you would think, giving his scrappy living conditions). When Oscar (Mamoudou Athie), a doorman at a fancy restaurant Cole has stolen from, gets wise to the hacker’s schemes, he strong-arms Cole into performing the same digital trickery on Sarah (Sasha Calle) and her unusually heavy checking account. When someone comes looking for that missing money, Cole, Sarah, and Oscar are drawn into a web of deception.
What Will It Remind You Of?: Rather than a mid-’90s internet-paranoia movie like Hackers or The Net, Wardriver plays more like a 1940s noir reskinned for the digital age, complete with criminal types, a morally compromised protagonist, and a possible femme fatale.
Performance Worth Watching: Everyone in the movie’s small cast does nicely understated work, but Dane DeHaan, a former next-big-thing who never quite made it to the top of the Hollywood pyramid, is especially grabby as a loner whose cleverness may not extend as far as he’d like.
Memorable Dialogue: Though Daniel Casey’s screenplay does a decent job updating noir tropes for the 2020s, it’s less memorable for its dialogue than its minimalism. We’re often watching Cole on his own, scrambling through scams or typing at a computer, with a compelling use of menacing quiet on the streets of the movie’s Salt Lake City setting.
Sex and Skin: Though DeHaan resembles sort of a Dirtbag DiCaprio (which is to say, DiCaprio from One Battle After Another) and Calle is also strikingly gorgeous, the movie’s sexuality is relatively muted for a contemporary movie (though it smolders in an appropriately retro way).
Our Take: The minimalism of Wardriver occasionally turns into a hinderance. The plot’s twists and turns ultimately feel pretty predictable, especially if you’ve seen more than a handful of noir thrillers. How refreshing, though, to see a new movie with such a firm grasp of noir fundamentals. Director Rebecca Thomas is known primarily for her TV work, including a notoriously fan-hated episode of Stranger Things. Yet her second feature doesn’t at all feel like that film-TV hybrid you often see in streaming movies. (It probably helps that Wardriver was at least nominally produced for theaters.) The film’s atmospheric shadows — a lot of it takes place at night — are rich and textured, rather than just murky, and Thomas makes great use of Salt Lake City locations to evoke a world that’s nocturnal and urban but surprisingly desolate at times.
DeHaan and Calle are both superhero-movie refugees — he was teeing up to iinherit the mask of the Green Goblin in the ill-fated Amazing Spider-Man film series, while she played Supergirl in a supporting role in The Flash — but despite their still-youthful good looks, they’re able to play the kinds of parts that in the 1940s equivalent of this movie would go to older-looking (if not actually older) performers. They’re both plenty charismatic, as is Mamoudou Athie, who often plays gentler personalities, while remaining believable as characters trapped in a tight spot. It would be easy to overhype Wardriver; this is a small-scale movie, somewhat predictable in its broad outlines. Yet studios have so thoroughly abandoned this kind of modest, yet stylishly-wrought, genre play that a 95-minute hacker thriller with well-drawn characters and noir bona fides feels, at times, like a revelation.
Our Call: I have no idea how broader audiences discovered Wardriver, but they’re right to keep watching it. It’s a rock-solid thriller. STREAM IT.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Wardriver on Paramount+
