To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar utilizes one of the weakest of Hollywood conceits—the idea that two people, having known each other less than a day, can instantly influence each other’s lives. This fish-out-of-water comedy, which plops three New York drag queens in the middle of Smallest Town, U.S.A., squanders glam characters and characters leading lives of quiet desperation. Instead, it focuses on drippy sentimentality, concluding finally with speeches that boil down to, “In the 20 minutes you’ve spent in my kitchen, you’ve become like family.”

What’s disappointing about the soggy finale is that opens with surprising promise. Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze—two fine actors who have been unfortunately saddled with a string of dull macho action-movie roles—put on makeup and dresses as the soundtrack plays an up-tempo soul number that celebrates femininity. Some of the audience merely chuckles—this is the gag they’ve come to the film to see—but those of us who have been dreading the way one dreads a throat exam are momentarily intrigued. Who are these two big lugs, and why do they like to dress in drag? Why is Snipes dancing joyously while Swayze suits up with a melancholy reserve? Is there going to be more to this movie than just toothless Hollywood comedy?

Sadly, there’s not. could have presented nuanced characters in a meaningful scenario, but it’s too busy using plot twists to force its principals into situations that they could’ve ended up in anyway. Swayze and Snipes win the “Drag Queen of New York” contest (to get them on a trip to Hollywood), and they decide to bring along loser queen John Leguizamo (to get the trio in a convertible instead of a plane). A romp across middle America ensues.

This is essentially the same plot as The Muppet Movie (minus the cleverness), and in their sexless simplicity, these queens might just as well be puppets. Even the logy feel-good message of the film—“Be yourself, follow your dream”—is just one step removed from “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Once the dresses go on, Swayze, Snipes and Leguizamo cease to be vulnerable or intelligent; they’ve also been carefully stripped of any sexuality—they’re neutered dress-up dolls, like Barbie. This movie presents fashion sense alone as the be-all, end-all of drag culture, and after awhile the relentless bubbleheadedness of the queens (especially the grating Leguizamo) becomes insulting.

As for the small town, it remains little more than a stage. These stereotypically grimy, blah rednecks (including Stockard Channing in a superfluous battered-wife role) seem to have had no community life before the “ladies” came to town. They’re creations of a mind that views rural America through the prism of Petticoat Junction. The cruelest slap in the townspeople’s face is that they apparently aren’t supposed to know there are drag queens in their midst (rather, they think they’re hosting “career girls”).

Don’t the filmmakers have imagination? Have their small-towners never even watched Ricki LakeNoel Murray

Software

Hackers is basically a 1950s juvenile delinquent movie in modern drag, and it works for pretty much the same reasons as those old low-budget drive-in flicks: cool clothes, a cool look, cool music and an irresistible anti-authoritarian attitude. Velvet Underground muscle shirts and rave music may have replaced tank tops and Eddie Cochran, but at its core Hackers is reassuringly retro, down to the seemingly square parent who stands up to the cops when the hammer comes down.

The protagonist of Hackers would’ve fit perfectly into something like : His name is Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller), but he’s really the infamous computer genius Zero Cool, who once sent the New York Stock Exchange plummeting with a sophisticated virus before he was even in junior high school. Now he’s a teenager, recently transplanted to New York, and before long he’s tapped into a group of colorful hacker misfits who prove themselves by accessing restricted information. When a member of the group gets nailed by the Secret Service after downloading a suspicious file, Dade and his fellow hackers realize they’ve been set up to take the fall for a vast corporate scheme involving a smoke screen computer virus, embezzlement and ecological terrorism.

The plot suffers from the same flaw that plagues all computer movies from to The Net: Once director Iain Softley () establishes the villains’ global capabilities, the threat looms so huge that any escape is implausible. The high-tech gimmickry and gadgetry may be state of the art, but the corporate-fraud plot is strictly manual-typewriter stuff, and the resolution involves two perennially dopey screenwriter’s contrivances: the broadcast that the entire nation happens to be watching at once, and the completely untrustworthy outcast everybody instantly believes when they see him on TV.

Hackers has going for it is a lot of flash and energy, supplied mainly by an appealingly offbeat cast of virtual unknowns. (Among the hackers, the most familiar face belongs to Jesse Bradford from Steven Soderburgh’s marvelous King of the Hill; that should tell celebrity junkies what to expect.) The movie’s most interesting feature is the combative by-play among these quirky outsiders, especially between Dade and a fascinating hacker with the handle Acid Burn.

Acid Burn, played by a smart, luscious actress named Angelina Jolie, is the most interesting contemporary teenage girl we’ve seen onscreen since Samantha Mathis in Pump Up the Volume: She’s ferociously cocky, strong, and unabashedly competitive, and she doesn’t have the plasticene cheerleader blandness that passes for beauty in most teen movies—her features are too dark, her lips too lush. She’s especially welcome in a movie about the hacker world, whose rote sexism gets pretty tiresome. (I got really sick of people sneering that someone as stunning as Sandra Bullock couldn’t be a computer ace.) It’s also nice to see that fine, intensely sexy actress Alberta Walker (the mother in Spanking the Monkey), although her role as Dade’s mom is much too brief.

Hackers lacks the perspective that might have made it a generational touchstone: Despite the vivid neon-drenched sets of the hacker hangouts, we never learn much about how these bright, individualistic kids think, or why they’re even interested in computers. But the great cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, who photographed Quentin Tarantino’s movies, sets every nighttime exterior aglow with graffiti hues: The movie looks like spray-painted noir. And the many pop culture jokes in Rafael Moreu’s script—which range from insider references (a character named for controversial hacker Emanuel Goldstein) to silly toss-offs (two cops named Bob and Ray, a computer watchman named Hal)—give the movie its good-natured wiseguy tone. Hackers doesn’t cut very deep, but it’s fleet and funny and uncluttered. It’s an honest piece of hackwork.—Jim Ridley