Review of Blackhat (2015) by Patrick L — 19 Aug 2015

"Michael Mann, were you hacked by North Korea as well? "Blackhat" is a total disaster from beginning to end".

DVD Movie Review: Blackhat.

Date Viewed: May 7 2015.

Directed By Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral,.

The Insider, Public Enemies, The Last of the Mohicans and Thief).

Screenplay By Michael Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl, Story By Michael Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl.

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, Holt McCallany, Wang Leehom, Ritchie Coster, Yorick van Wageningen, Manny Montana, William Mapother, Andy On and John Ortiz.

What the hell happened to Michael Mann? He's one of my favorite filmmakers. Nobody can shoot urban night scenes like Michael Mann. He was responsible for making three of the best thrillers of all time, "The Insider", "Collateral" and "Heat". Mann's new movie "Blackhat" is a total disaster from beginning to end. It has a flat narrative and a stiff performance by Chris Hemsworth. He has shown that he can act in Ron Howard's "Rush" but he is unbelievable as a computer hacker.

Just when I thought this movie was going to be boring as hell, there are not one but two sequences where we spend time watching the camera navigate the inner-workings of a computer system as it is hacked by a mysterious hacker. Hemsworth plays Hathaway, a blackhat computer hacker serving 15 years behind bars for computer crimes. After a nuclear meltdown in China, the Chinese government and the Department of Justice want to know who the mysterious hacker is. FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) and Chinese military officer Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) give Hathaway an offer he can't refuse. If he finds the blackhat hacker who caused the nuclear meltdown in China, he will be released from prison. The blackhat hacker also manages to break into the stock market and send millions of dollars into three different bank accounts.

For a world-class hacker like Hathaway, he can sure take out the trash because he can beat up a gang of about six Chinese thugs.

Hathaway also gets attracted to Chen's sister, Chen Lien (Tang Wei) who is a networking engineer. The romance between them makes no sense whatsoever and come on movie! Lien is supposed to be a networking engineer? She probably isn't smart enough to be a real estate agent. the big problem with this movie is the sound mixing, sometimes the dialogue drops out of the movie automatically, at other times becoming much louder. For a movie set in the world of global cybercrime, it is pretty dumb.

Hathaway has two unintentionally funny moments in the movie, he uses a USB stick to access a network of bank computers and (SPOILER ALERT!) when the bad guys kill the military officer and agent Barrett, he says to his girlfriend, "I'm a fugitive now!". HELLO! YOU ARE A FUGITIVE! Who are you Justin Bieber? "Blackhat" is by far the worst movie Michael Mann has ever made. It's also one of the worst movies of 2015.

This movie died of quick death from two much competition during it's opening weekend, it faced-off with American Sniper, The Wedding Ringer, Paddington and Taken 3. After just three weeks in theaters, Universal pulled "Blackhat" from distribution and a took $90 million write down on it. OUCH! I hope Michael Mann can come back from this fiasco. His botched movie was obviously hacked by North Korea because it was about cybercrime and Hollywood was still reeling from the epic cyber attack on Sony Pictures. Here's one thing we can learn from this bomb, never cast a Hemsworth brother as a techno genius.