If tricksters are among us, they are probably online, in the digital forest where morally ambiguous “gray hat” hackers and bands of pranksters like Anonymous roam as if they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men. In films, at least, the hacker appears as a kind of complicated folk hero. Consider the mercenary bandits in “Sneakers” (1992) who thwart a domestic surveillance ploy, only to turn the Holy Grail of code breaking over to the National Security Agency. Following their rebel leader, Martin Bishop (Robert Redford), these “sneakers” are a unit of mostly reformed hooligans turned hackers and burglars who contract their services to banks and other secure institutions to reveal just how insecure those clients are. When we meet them, all’s fairly right in the sneakers’ world, except that Marty has a past and a warrant out for his arrest. So, when two N.S.A. officers stroll into his office with a shady job offer, the lure of amnesty and financial reward is enough to persuade him to commit treason. Though the crew’s absolute morality is never entirely in question, it is easy to wonder whether they are breaking codes and laws for the seemingly paltry award or because they can.

Of course, code breaking and slipping through gateways is the trickster’s forte. Movies have always been a bit awed by the occult magic of computer whizzes, doing whatever it is they do with those letters on a screen, casting and cracking software spells. Sandra Bullock’s programmer in “The Net” (1995) was deemed so dangerous to the players in a government conspiracy that they allocated what must have been millions of dollars to chase her. But if she was a de facto criminal, it was a corrupted and criminal system that had made her so. And it is only when she is forced outside the law that she can destroy the conspiracy Chimera to reclaim her life. Similarly, Alan Cumming’s hacker in “Goldeneye” the same year, much like Justin Long’s in “Live Free or Die Hard” (2007) and Tim Robbins’s ersatz Bill Gates in the wretched “Antitrust” (2001), had the power both to wreak and to prevent cataclysmic damage.