DELETE KEY

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

She's shy, lonesome and doesn't do much with her natural prettiness. It's only after you get to know her that you realize she's bright and eager to break out of her shell and that crisis is her preferred cosmetic. It is the source of the transfiguring glow that makes Sandra Bullock's screen character into a doofus dream girl, a sex symbol the nerdy '90s can relate to.

In The Net, as opposed to Speed and While You Were Sleeping, she at least has a decent job, as a computer-systems analyst. But her Angela Bennett still doesn't have a life. She works at home, orders in pizza via the Internet and has only one hands-on relationship -- with her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. Through no fault of her own, Angela comes into possession of a program that is being marketed as a vaccine for computer viruses but is itself an electronic Ebola. It can gather data from the most secret sources and spread false information anywhere it wants. Needless to say, Angela must be deleted before she can delete it.

To this end, an old-fashioned hit man (Jeremy Northam) is employed and constantly, pluckily frustrated by her. What's much more difficult for Angela to handle is the near terminal case of technoparanoia her enemies induce in her by erasing her true self from everyone's data bank and substituting a false identity (as a prostitute-drug addict) in the world's records. There are some logical jump cuts in The Net's narrative. But director (and co-writer) Irwin Winkler has a confident sense of pace and scale, a healthy skepticism about the morals and motives of cyberspace cadets and, in Bullock, an actress whose gumption and vulnerability can penetrate any plastic pocket protector and jump-start the most shriveled hacker's heart beneath it.