BLACKHAT (Michael Mann). 127 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (January 16). See listing. Rating: NN
Where to watch: iTunes
Near the end of Blackhat, brilliant super-hacker Chris Hemsworth sneaks into Indonesia undetected in order to track his opposite number, an equally brilliant but utterly amoral super-hacker whose cybercrimes include bringing a Chinese nuclear reactor to the brink of meltdown and spiking global futures trading on livestock feed.
The idea that human giant Hemsworth, whom you may recall is most famous for playing an actual Norse god in several Marvel movies, might be able to blend into an Indonesian crowd when he’s a foot taller and several shades paler than every other human being around him is somehow not the most ridiculous thing about Blackhat’s premise.
But then Blackhat is a Michael Mann film, and that means you are going to get certain things, and all of them will be presented as deadly serious. Mann really only makes one kind of movie, after all, and it’s about a man on a mission. It’s not surprising that Mann’s masterpiece, the 1999 Big Tobacco docudrama The Insider, is the film that bears the fewest of his tropes, and also has laughs.
You’re going to get a murky moral landscape where the FBI relies on a brilliant convict to help them catch a bigger monster, as in Manhunter. You’re going to get a supposed criminal whose code of personal honour makes him in fact more moral than the supposed good guys, as in Heat and Public Enemies. You’re going to get a lot of moody scenes where men clench their jaws and look off into the middle distance while the women who love them (or, as Mann sees them, “their women”) stand by and watch worriedly, as in Thief, The Keep, Manhunter, Heat, Miami Vice, Public Enemies and maybe even The Last Of The Mohicans – I don’t know, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that one.
In Blackhat, the mission for which Hemsworth’s computer whiz Hathaway is sprung from maximum-security prison is simple: find the mysterious cyberfiend – the “blackhat” – behind the attacks on the Chinese nuclear plant and Wall Street and stop him from doing anything else. He’s drafted into service by his old MIT roommate Chen (Wang Leehom), now a Chinese official who recognizes elements of the evildoer’s code as something he and Hathaway cooked up on a bet as students. (It takes a thief to catch a thief, even in the 21st century.)
The mission takes our heroes – accompanied by Chen’s equally tech-savvy sister Lien (Lust, Caution’s Tang Wei) and two FBI agents (Viola Davis, Holt McCallany) – bouncing all over Asia, as Mann does his best to jazz up long stretches of exposition and computer-screen fluffery with CG sequences straight out of Tron (the original, not the sequel). It doesn’t really work, and Morgan Davis Foehl’s script isn’t sharp or shaded enough to keep things interesting.
It all comes down to the set pieces. An early shootout at a container yard is undermined by Mann’s fetish for filling the screen with his actors’ eyes and earlobes in watery digital video, rendering spatial relationships incomprehensible. But a visit to the heart of that Chinese nuclear reactor is creepy and breathless in exactly the right way, and a subsequent explosion-and-gun-battle sequence jolts the plot fully to life, propelling it into a third act that’s equal parts silly and spellbinding.
It’s in the home stretch, when Mann strips away all the cyber-nonsense and narrows his focus down to his trademark conflict between evenly matched professionals, that Blackhat finally feels like a movie.
Whether you’re willing to slog through that first 80 minutes to get there, though? That’s a different question.
