Review of Blackhat (2015) by Richard Y — 08 Apr 2015

Despite being another slick production from director Michael Mann, for some reason it lacks excitement, possibly due to a draggy first half and plausibility of the story but at least he gets the Hong Kong localities accurate for once, like Quarry Bay, Tsuen Wan, Central for instance and the seedy street eateries are well depicted.

Typical of cybercrime movies, close-ups of tense faces operating laptops, urgent typing, glimpses of computer monitors and in this case, SFX of signals travelling through wires to the core are images that will stick to your mind more than anything else.

Scenes when Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken without onscreen subtitles can be bewildering for non-Chinese speaking folks, and once again although the plotline is straightforward, some actors mumble their lines so badly they render some situations unitelligible.

All that aside, it's not as bad as most critics rated it esp. if you're a Hong Konger cos a lot of it was shot there.