Sneakers
A pentesting crew is blackmailed into stealing a black box that breaks every cryptographic system in use. Tradecraft is dated but the framing of an offensive consulting team holds up.
- Directors
- Phil Alden Robinson
- Released
- 1992
- Writers
- Phil Alden Robinson, Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes
- Runtime
- 126 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Anyone in offensive security who wants the closest thing to a reasonable Hollywood depiction of a red team. The team dynamics, social engineering, and physical intrusion sequences hold up better than expected.
Skip this if
Anyone expecting cryptographically literate plot. The "device that breaks all crypto" is McGuffin-grade and the math is hand-waved with a chalk equation.
Key takeaways
- Hollywood's most realistic depiction of a pentest team is still a film from 1992, which says something about the genre.
- Social engineering and physical access ("my voice is my passport") were already understood as the soft side of every system.
- The political subtext (NSA vs. cypherpunks vs. organized crime) reads like a documentary of the 1990s crypto wars.
Notes
Written by the same Lasker / Parkes team as WarGames, nine years later, with vastly more technical confidence. The cast (Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, Strathairn, Phoenix, Kingsley) is overqualified and it shows. Pair with Levy's Crypto for the policy backdrop and with The Cuckoo's Egg for what the era's actual incident response looked like. Best double feature with WarGames if you want a single evening on "how Hollywood imagined our field."