From everything that I heard about the original script (which was "obtained" under mysterious circumstances and leaked to the world before shooting started), I was expecting this movie to be really, really awful. I was pleasantly surprised to see that either Miramax, the writers, and/or the producers took some of the hacker community's complaints seriously, and adjusted the script accordingly. The final script that was filmed is certainly more even-handed and fair to Kevin Mitnick than Shimomura and Markoff's horrible book "Takedown" was (for a much better treatment of the Kevin Mitnick story, read Jonathan Littman's 1996 book "The Fugitive Game"), and we should be grateful that this film didn't end up being the hatchet-job on Kevin that we all thought it was going to be.
I was glad to see that the "trashcan cover scene", for example, didn't make the final cut, but a little disappointed that we weren't shown how large of a role that John Markoff played during Shimo's "manhunt" for Kevin, and then afterward; according to their own book, Markoff was present for many of the events that took place in North Carolina, and should have at least been shown in the scenes at the cell site alongside Shimo, Julia and the FBI agents.
They also could have done more with the "Lance" character, who represented a real hacker calling himself "Agent Steal" that was working for the FBI, and who figured prominently in the arrest and conviction of another hacker named Kevin Poulsen. (Poulsen's story, done properly, would make for a great movie too, but I digress..) Another no-brainer, slam-dunk scene that should have been in the movie, but wasn't for some reason, was Kevin and Shimo's one and only face to face meeting, in a North Carolina courtroom shortly after his arrest, where Kevin uttered his now famous line "I respect your skills" to Shimo.
I mean, it's no "Saving Private Ryan" or "Godfather Part II", but it isn't bad, either; in fact, it is a much more realistic and enjoyable movie than "Hackers" or "Sneakers" (to its credit, "Hackers" did have the lovely Angelina Jolie going for it), though not as much fun as "War Games", which is truly the "Citizen Kane" of hacker movies, or "Pump Up The Volume", which was more of a hacker movie than people realize, even though the "hacking" is done with a pirate radio station instead of a computer.
As others have already recommended here, go find a copy of "Freedom Downtime", the excellent documentary about Kevin that was produced by Emmanuel Goldstein and the staff of 2600 Magazine, you won't be disappointed.
