UNINTELLIGIBLE PLOT AND SCRIPT FAIL `ANTITRUST'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

There is undoubtedly a decent, pop paranoia piece to be made based on Microsoft and all that it represents. ``Antitrust,'' a film that keeps telling us it's concerned with computer geniuses but makes everybody involved appear brain dead, is not that movie.

Incompetent in every aspect other than Catherine Hardwicke's droll production designs and a few of Tim Robbins' takeoffs on Bill Gates, this suspenseless, microchip-deep thriller bores whenever it's not a laugh riot display of astonishing idiocy. This is the only movie I can think of that has ever considered murder by sesame seed a viable plot option. Worse, Howard Franklin's script, after committing much too much time to this ludicrous notion, doesn't even have the wherewithal to follow through on it.

But enough about that. Like too many alleged cyberthrillers, ``Antitrust'' blunders immediately into the trap of presuming that watching people type is innately intriguing. Of course, it isn't. And here's a tip, Hollywood: As more and more of us use computers for a living, seeing people at workstations in the movies feels increasingly like a job.

Or, worse, school. And when your dialogue is steeped in techno-jargon about digital conversion and binary buzz phrases, it drives even the best actors to the mind-numbing threshold. Imagine, then, what the featherless likes of Ryan Phillippe, Rachael Leigh Cook and Claire Forlani do with this gibberish.

Phillippe plays Milo, a Palo Alto computer genius who, with a bunch of buds working out of his garage, is about to secure funding for a cool guerrilla start-up company (obviously, this movie is already at least a year behind the economic curve). But Milo's work has attracted the attention of software conglom octopus N.U.R.V.'s megalogeek CEO Gary Winston (Robbins in a series of artfully ill-combed Gates wigs).

Though successfully fighting off government investigators on one front and still acting like a wonderstruck nerd on another, the cutthroat businessman in Gary is desperate to get the aforementioned DC satellite system - a service he calls SYNAPSE that will link all communication devices on Earth for, of course, a nominal usage fee - up and running in time for a selmposed deadline. Gary needs someone of Milo's ability to work out a glitch in the system, and makes him an offer he can't refuse to do so.

While conflicted Milo and his vacuous artist girlfriend Alice (Forlani) head north to Portland for the big bucks, his principled former partner Teddy (Yee Jee Tso) stays behind to work on a system that will make DC free to all. At N.U.R.V.'s goofy campus (the acronym means Never Underestimate Radical Vision, an imperative the filmmakers clearly did not take to heart), Milo is distracted by kewpie doll programmer Lisa (Cook), while Gary keeps dumping helpful new programs from mysterious sources on him.

When Teddy is brutally murdered in what appears to be a hate crime, it sets Milo to thinking ... or whatever it is that resembles that activity in this movie's universe. Could N.U.R.V. operatives be killing independent software developers and stealing their work? Well, duh. But is Milo slick enough to stop this? And who can he trust, since the corporation is rich enough to have any potential ally in its pocket?

Plus, y'know, any minute, one of those deadly sesame seeds ...

The acting runs no gamut from somnambulant to frantic; there's little in-between, just those two modes. Director Peter Howitt (``Sliding Doors''), perhaps daunted by the high-tech setting, seems to have expended all of his energy on laying out the plot in a coherent manner. There's nothing left over to build resonance from scene to scene, or make the crucial timing of suspense sequences better than rudimentary.

Needless to say, character and thematic development are more absent here than from the latest ``Redneck Rampage'' video game. You could probably make a smarter movie out of ``Redneck Rampage,'' too.

``ANTITRUST''

(Rated PG-13: violence, language)

The stars: Ryan Phillippe, Tim Robbins, Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Peter Howitt. Written by Howard Franklin. Produced by Nick Wechsler, Keith Addis and David Nicksay. Released by MGM.

Running time: Two hours.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: One star