Review of Blackhat (2015) by Justin J — 16 Jan 2015

The good about Michael Mann's Black Hat is that, well, it's a Michael Mann film. With all the tropes he loves most (moody, existential themes, sodden music sweeps, conflicted and morally vacillating characters and a dearth of plot logic, plus tons of dusk shots, exploding cars and loud guns), The bad is, it's a genre mash-up with no real idea of how cybercrime actually works or what motivations might get hackers to want to trigger an attack.

Mann loads viewers up on carbs, but there's no meaty resolution. The Chinese are hacked, with Fukushima-like results. That sends their best digital countermeasures expert (a soldier, to boot) to America's FBI because, theoretically, we received the same villainous attack but it failed. Te Chinese want to know why. In reality, this is an excuse to bring Hemsworth's jailed hacker into the mix. Once on board, the China/US team plunges down the rabbit hole of false starts, double-crosses, villainous thugs and Asian restaurants. After several major plot maneuvers, the apparently martially-lethal hacker gets to exact his revenge on the bad guys for the slimmest of reasons, and turns his back on both countries to boot. Like many Mann films, the end is resolved, but there's no moral victory.

Mann doesn't get digital tech and his depictions of computer processes are quaintly analog. I mean, blinking lights, weird noises, in a bad knock-off of the years-old Matrix. Chris Hemsworth, whom I was starting to think could do no wrong, is left to his own devices as a granite-jawed genius who can't think up a lick of intelligent dialogue. And plausibility? These well armed and vicious hacker thugs is almost an affront to nerdism.

At any rate, the movie had promise. If Mann had found a more clever writer (sci-fi author Daniel Suarez comes to mind), he might have made a tighter noir cyber-thriller, but this isn't it. Thank God there's no likely sequal.