Blackhat review

          Micheal Mann's male heroes were never as simple or as ideologically set as the muscle-bound Rambo types of the 80s, nor as damaged or doomed as the Travis Bickle types from the decade before. Characters like Al Pachino in “Heat” or William Peterson in “Manhunter” or James Caan in Mann's first feature “Theif” were masculine, morally ambiguous, and darkly sexual all at the same time. Taking his cues from classic film noir and the burgeoning popularity of MTV, Mann pretty much invented this archetype and up until recently had successfully reinterpreted it for three decades in a row.

          In his post-911 hacker-espionage film “Blackhat,” Mann tries to return to his sexy crime-thriller style and somehow drops the ball completely. Given the recent hacking scandals at Sony Pictures, the leaking of private celebrities iPhone pics, or the reveal of NSA intelligence breaches by cyber-savvy whistle-blowers, this film had all the potential to be a timely and intelligent genre movie, but as it would happen, none of that was incorporated or considered and what we have instead is an underwritten, uneven deodorant commercial that looks as though it were shot by armature film students doing a Michael Mann study.

         After an unknown cyber-terrorist manages to hack the hydraulic systems of a nuclear power plant and causes a near-meltdown, the CIA enlists prisoner and former super-hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) to help them beat the bad guys at their own game. It's a simple enough action movie plot structure to satisfy without complicating the formula, but once you add a superfluous love story with the tag-a-long Chinese sister of another hacker (Wei Tang and Leehom Wang) along with crudely executed, digital shaky-cam action sequences, you're left with a haggard headache of a movie. Even Oscar nominated Viola Davis as the apprehensive CIA operative who agrees to let Hathaway out of prison, so long as he wears an electronic anklet, doesn't help to bring any depth or originality to this drab disappointment.

         The script leaves no room for character exploration or pathos and instead uses most of it's dialogue to go over needless exposition. Hemsworth has nothing to do here, and, looking not unlike Don Johnson in “Miami Vice,” is comically miscast as the computer genius criminal. More frustrating, because his role is so underdeveloped we never actually see how any of his coding or techniques are realistically accomplished. Instead Mann visualizes the hack-attacks and retaliations through goofy CGI explorations of the inner-workings of computer circuitry; a strange and obnoxious crutch. As previously mentioned, the tormented love story between Tang and Hemsworth is uninformed and unmotivated and eats up more than third of the movie's run-time.

         The one element that should be able to save a bad screenplay, the action, is so miss-handled by the visually jarring transitions to cheap looking digi-cam single-takes that the film simply toggles between being depressingly ordinary and embarrassingly inept. There is the occasional flourish of style, as best exemplified in the final showdown between Hemsworth and the baddies as he tries to sneak up on them during a ceremonial parade in Jakarta, but unfortunately these moments of clear and steady direction are few and far between. Lastly, with it's awkward integration of Chinese celebrities and locations, the film's desperate attempt to pander to the Chinese market only proves that Mann's faith in his own project was compromised from conception with lazy and vulgar business choices, reflected in every aesthetic decision on screen.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2015