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| Review by Clay N Ferno |
Chris Hemsworth leads the cast as convicted white collar hacker Nicholas Hathaway enlisted by the FBI and the Chinese to take down a globe-spanning network of criminals threatening the safety of the world’s economy and nuclear energy in Blackhat.
Divisive director Michael Mann (Heat, Public Enemies) gets on the cyber-hacking bandwagon nearly twenty years too late, but the movie does have some great action moments if you can start to follow the logic of the thing.
Co-star Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) delivers a great performance as Lien Chen, partner to the furloughed Hathaway, though she could have easily been given more to do as a female leading lady by Mann or the story architects.
Blackhat is a named after a hacker term for someone who can decode high level security. How that translates to the screen is often hum-drum and at times this is where the movie dictates its own very slow pace. Close-up shots of USB flash drives, 1’s and 0s scrolling across the screen a la The Matrix all look cool — for a second — but this sets the tone as being a bore from the intro.
The movie opens on one computer terminal, follows the signal down to the Tron-like circuit board and into a CPU.
Falling asleep yet?
I sort of was. I figured out later that this was a virus sent from one side of the world to a Chinese power plant to initiate a meltdown though the magic of the internet. While this could have been shot or visualized better, I do get the point of all the technological showboating but this was no way to start a movie.
Later on in the film, I would get the requisite shots fired and explosions along with a Chinese food restaurant hand-to-hand fight scene that I’ve come to expect while enjoying my popcorn.
Perhaps I’m a bit heavy handed describing the pace of the first two acts, but the movie did have some redeeming qualities.
Hathaway is just your typical good looking, god-like hacker in prison that has his MIT roommate Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) enlist him to find the shadow network that is affecting stock markets. The reason why is that they made the code together at the revered Cambridge institution and need to find their way around it. The mission takes them across the world to see who is profiting and who is dying along the way.
While watching people dial in to proxy servers via a terminal command prompt to me is as thrilling as watching paint dry, the FBI agents on the case, including Viola Davis (Prisoners, Ender’s Game and the upcoming Suicide Squad as Amanda Waller) and Holt McCallany (Fight Club, Gangster Squad, The Losers) keep up the good cop / bad cop action and move the story along as Hemsworth’s federal guardians. Davis calls out a sketchy stockbroker withholding information in a particularly Amanda Waller-esque blackmail.
We are used to Thor’s Norse speak, but the Australian affects a street tough Chicago accent in Blackhat. Mann even throws himself a shout-out to Heat ‘being around the corner’ in the dialogue when describing the criminals they are after. Maybe people will go rent that movie when reminded of it!
In summary, if Blackhat were to hang itself on the coat rack of logic, there are plenty of holes and lots of places where the connections are not made from story to motivation. On the plus side, when we do get some action it comes quickly, surprisingly and with consequences. As an action movie we are near four stars but overall we land at about a two.
Sorry, Thor, I wanted to watch you tap into The Matrix, but it was hard to feel like I cared how you got there. Oh Hollywood — you must have so many checklists these days. It might be time to drop the clipboard and let people take some risks. Or at least don’t make one of our action stars choose between a lumbar supporting mesh chair from Staples with RSI-prevention mouse pad and a shoot-em-out with the baddies. Sorry, we just want to see the guns!
