User Reviews

As seems to be the norm, J.B finishes his daily regimen of exercise, leaves his programmed (alter) ego online to do his paid work and sets out to assist his friend/love intrigue Miauv with hers. Her private investigations conveniently peek in, through a camera lens, on one of J.B's colleagues at the moment he's sexed to death. The duo spring into action; but catching the killer proves difficult. An angry ice climber slows the foot chase before it begins and after a brief vehicular distraction the chase tries to return to foot. Here the brazen technophile shows her ineptitude by locking herself in her car, with an over-sized key fob, while the assassin saunters away. All seems lost, but subsequent analysis of the surveillance footage reveals someone well-known was behind the trigger of the murder weapon.

Forcefully summoned to an audience with his boss, Cyberworld domain overlord Stoiss, J.B discovers his other colleague has also met a similar end. Fingered for both of the deaths and the theft of a significant sum of credits from Stoiss' online account; robbed of his online ego and landed with a pair of knuckle-dragging goons and a time bomb pacemaker in place of a flat lined heart; J.B is sent forth into the moral wasteland to retrieve the money and clear his name before the mechanical hourglass runs dry.

Although our hero emanates an aura befitting a prime hacker, he makes no attempt to deny his overdependance on scripted tools. While he complains bitterly about being unable to complete the job unassisted, Miauv wakes and sets off to save him. Ultimately, despair triumphs and it's down to J.B's hasty scheming to untangle the crossed players and restore stability to the world and its digital sub-unit. Log on to a finale of double-crosses and real-to-life metered out justice.

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Overall enjoyable. One of the least disappointing cyberpunk themed flicks I've come across. Nothing too far-out plotwise, some good acting to contrast with bad. Visually conservative with some locations, probably due to budget constraints, but not in an overly apparent or off-putting way. The computer environment effects are a little dated, but in my opinion they're still stylish in their own way.

I found little sense in other comments comparing this to Blade Runner or the Matrix. Apart from a futuristic backdrop I can't see anything to suggest any script cloning has taken place.

I think the cards were stacked against Webmaster, because right from the start there was this itchy feeling, like something was wrong but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then it hit me. Dubbed. For a little while, they managed most of the lines either as voice over or off screen, with just a little hint here and there, until it became painfully obvious. This is the kind of dubbing that grates on the nerves, with nothing even remotely funny about it. I hate dubbing, but at least, however misplaced, martial arts films badly dubbed tend to have a sense of humour about it.

What I wanted was a film about a hacker doing actual hacking and stuff like that. Maybe like a reverse side of the table of the movie Hackers (being about the person trying to keep them out instead about the people trying to get in). What I got was some poorly written, nonsensical at times murder mystery with a ton of bad chase sequences, a supposedly inept hacker who was neutered without his little ego, and a director who obviously didn't know how to handle a camera. I just wanted to reach in there, grab the camera from the guy, and shoot the dang thing myself. The editing wasn't much better. The acting? Well, I guess if the lead guy didn't have such a bad script to work from, he'd be at least watchable. The main bad guy was OK, too, but pretty much everyone else was a joke. Dubbing didn't help, but the acting was pretty bad even taking that into consideration.

Before I get into more bad, let's perk up to a few good things. Well, one or two. Despite the rudimentary graphics, I rather enjoyed the cyberworld stuff, what little there was of it, and would have much rather watched a movie mostly about, in, and around that than the tepid surroundings outside in the 'real world'. The falsifying thumbprint thing seemed kind of cool, but ended up being rather useless in the scheme of things. The heart gadget, which reminded me of Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos, was interesting, though as a plot device ripped directly from the pages of Escape from New York, it was horribly conceived in the long run. There's one point where the bad guy is unconscious and our hero is right there. Why didn't he try the bad guy's thumb print then (since the heart device was thumb activated)? Nonetheless, some interesting gadgets and cyber stuff, if only they could have been utilized better.

Now, who here dares compare this movie to Blade Runner? Both films take place sometime in the future and there's some kind of off kilter type of romance in it, sort of, in both films. There's the investigation of a murder, but I've seen many a film with a murder at its center that are nothing like either Blade Runner or Webmaster. Identity, for instance. That's about where the similarities end. Period. There is no comparison, just as there wouldn't be between Blade Runner and Hackers. Ridley Scott is a brilliant director with a great mind for art direction and knows some fundamentals of film-making, like where to put the camera. Webmaster is cheap, and not just because of the budget. It's cheap because of bad writing, and because it more often than not takes the easy way out (like writing in a character who barely appeared in the first place to save the girl in the end to get her to Point B by herself without the Hero, so that he could do his thing. Very convenient. Or, the attempted sympathy factor for a character we have no reason to care for. Or, inane things like the car set up to stall them just enough for someone to get away.).

It tries to be hip, it tries to be exploitive, it even tries a twist ending that's not the least bit surprising, and it tries to be thrilling. But a bunch of near identical chase sequences, bad writing, editing, horribly shot, bad acting, etc. does not a thrilling movie make.