Review of Blackhat (2015) by Jao R — 17 Aug 2015

Michael Mann blew all of his budget for the IT consultant. Somehow, he forgot to hire a competent scriptwriter. But even forgetting that for a moment, what kind of director would fail to check his writer's script? So in the end, we have to accept that Mann read the script and signed off on it. Which makes him all the more stupid.

Where do I start? (Spoilers) First, a hacker who fights like a NAVY-Seal. What? But that's okay, he learned all this while in prison. How about a hacker villain who is stupid enough to think that blowing up Nuclear Reactors in China and the US is a good thing? But don't let logic get in the way of your thinking, we have bad guys here punching people in a parade and no riot even starts. Like seriously. The rest of the people just parade on, like nothing happened. Then when guns are pulled out, people don't see it, or they just don't care. Anyway, the parade goes on, people are oblivious as our hero and villain engage in a knife fight. When the gunfight does start, people run towards the guns!

But you know what's really unbelievable? This convoluted plan of the villain to make a lot of money by manipulating soy prices and profiting from it. Well, you'll say "What's convoluted in that?" And I'll say "well, he got 74 million dollars from that, but it turns out, that wasn't the plan. The plan was to manipulate soy prices to steal 74 million so he can use that 74 million to buy stock on Tin. And you're like "well, that's still simple." And I'm like "Well, that's where the convolution starts. It turns out that the villain had the nuclear reactors blown out just because he was rehearsing for his plan to flood a mining valley that will cause a shortage of tin. And the 74 million was just a prelude to buy those tin stocks. Am I making sense? Don't worry, neither did the writer.