Review of Blackhat (2015) by Elliot G — 25 Jan 2015

I'm a Michael Mann fan. I own his entire body of work either on DVD or digitally. I think Michael Mann has made some movies that have changed the genre to be quite honest (HEAT / Last Of the Mohicans). I started to see a slight decrease in script with Miami Vice. Although Colin Farrell was on metric tons of cocaine during production of that movie and it showed when I watched it. There are the same three things wrong with Blackhat that were wrong with Miami Vice:

1) Mr. Mann desperately wants to show the American moviegoers how big and complex the criminal world is but can't quite seem to tackle it in 2:15 minutes. Although Miami Vice was a much better film than Blackhat each film touches on similar subjects but Mr. Mann falls incredibly short in Blackhat.

2) Mr. Mann has a fascination with Chinese actresses in his last two films. He paired up Gong Li with Colin Farrell in Miami Vice and the chemistry wasn't there as well as her pronunciation of the English language. Tang Wei and Chris Hemsworth have the same exact problem in Blackhat. Please leave this alone for future films Mr. Mann - or better yet please let them speak their native language and use sub-titles.

3) Lastly and most importantly the movie was doomed from the opening scene as the moviegoers were presented with a digital recreation of how a computer virus travels thru a motherboard into an operating system. Mr. Mann falls short here as he doesn't have faith his viewers are not idiots and can't piece together a dramatic scene given to them by the director that would be blatantly obvious as we all knew what the movie was about walking into it.

I will watch all your movies in the future Mr. Mann but this one was not your best and to be honest it felt that if you had 4 hours to show what you had in mind it would of worked.