I know I’ve heard comments about this over the years, but I can’t remember whether people say it's surprisingly good, or so bad it's good.

It's somewhere in between, of course. It's very much of its time, which was 1995 — the same year as The Matrix, if I’m remembering correctly. And while it comes from a place not that far from The Matrix — it’s about hackers and how our lives are tied up with computer systems, after all — it’s very different.

Not least because it’s far more a realist piece, compared to the SF/fantasy stylings of the Wachowskis' film. Here, Sandra Bullock is a freelance computer expert of loosely defined skills, who gets caught in the backwash from the corruption of a sometime client’s security software.

Something like that, anyway. It starts very slowly, despite a dramatic prelude incident, but she’s soon on the run, wooed and threatened by a glamorous hacker/gangster.

Out on her own with no one she can trust, she has to trust herself.

It's not bad. Probably not so-bad-it’s-good, either. Just OK.