Undercooked cyber thriller needed a lot more Heat.
Directed by: Michael Mann
Written by: Morgan Davis Foehl
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Wei Tang, Viola Davis, Leehom Wang, Holt McCallany
The H-Bomb: After a cyber attack on a Hong Kong power plant triggers a meltdown, Chinese investigators Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and his sister, Lien (Wei Tang) team up with American investigator Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) to try and track down the criminals responsible. Trouble is, these cyber creeps are a little too good at covering their tracks, and the investigators realize that in order to catch them, they’re going to need the help of super-buff super-hacker, Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), who’s currently serving a lengthy stretch in the Federal Pen.
After some back and forth, and a little wheeling and dealing, they finally convince Nick to join the Mannhunt in exchange for a commuted sentence. Their search sends them hopping all over the globe; from L.A., to Hong Kong, to Indonesia, all the while uncovering a far more ambitious and malevolent plot by this elusive cyber terrorist.
Blackhat is not a terrible film, as many have asserted. It’s not even Michael Mann’s worst movie, not by a long shot, that honor still goes to Miami Vice (2006). It’s not up there with Heat or Collateral as being one of his best, and it certainly is not without its flaws, but did it deserve the ruthless drubbing it received during its exceptionally brief theatrical run? Not quite.
In a way, Blackhat brings out Mann’s best and worst traits as a filmmaker. The best being, of course, his visual style. Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography is, in typical Mann fashion, both gritty and beautiful in equal measure. Nobody shoots a city at night quite the way he does, and given that he’s filming in places like Hong Kong and Jakarta, we are treated to some vivid, vibrant images that just pop in high def. Much like Terence Malick, his films are gorgeous to look at, if nothing else.
Also, while not technically an action movie, the minute amount of action featured in Blackhat is exceedingly well-crafted and potent. The restaurant fight that takes place early on packs a mean wallop and nicely showcases Hemsworth’s prowess as an able-bodied ass-kicker, while the sporadic gun battles that come later are brief, but unflinchingly violent, and feature that thunderous, realistic sounding gunfire we’ve come to expect from this director. It’s all pretty impressive, and memorable, though we never get anything nearly as epic as the downtown shootout in Heat, or Tom Cruise’s nightclub massacre in Collateral.
Sadly, despite Mann’s sharp eye for visuals and his penchant for effectively staging violence, his storytelling abilities leave a little to be desired. This is due, in no small part, to the screenplay by Morgan Davis Foehl, which is rife with uninteresting, one-dimensional characters, dull expositional dialogue, and a convoluted plot that is never particularly compelling. We know there’s an evil hacker out there, we know our heroes must get him, but we’re never made to care. It’s a fairly weak script as is, but Mann’s pretentious approach to the material really doesn’t help.
There are numerous scenes in which the filmmaker simply allows his shots to linger, letting the haunting score by Harry Gregson-Williams and Atticus Ross fill the soundtrack, as Nick and his cohorts simply stand about, brooding and staring off into nothing. This happens over and over again. It’s meant to be moody, though it does little more than tediously tack on minutes to the film’s runtime. I won’t get into the opening scene, which takes us through the insides of a computer, except to say that it goes on for what feels like an eternity, and it looks as though the opening credits were meant to be shown over it… except they weren’t.
If there’s anything Michael Mann has lost as he’s gotten older, it’s not his sense of style, it’s his sense of pacing. Heat might have been three hours long, but it moved at a steady pace and there was nary a dull moment. Miami Vice was around two hours, yet creeped along so sluggishly that I barely got through it. Blackhat isn’t nearly the slog that Miami Vice was, but it definitely could’ve used a shot of adrenaline and a good trimming. At two hours and fourteen minutes, it is way overlong, and had it been a good half-hour shorter, which it could have easily been, I would be far more forgiving.
As it stands, Blackhat is a rather flaccid thriller with an inflated running time and an undercooked script. I was never really bored with it, per se, as I do enjoy some of Mann’s stylish flourishes, which, for me, carry the film a long way. I also feel that Hemsworth makes for a very engaging lead, despite his character being woefully underwritten. Of course (as everyone and their mother has opined), it’s hard to believe that a computer hacker would have such a ripped physique, and the onscreen romance that develops between Hemsworth and Tang is completely devoid of chemistry and is entirely unconvincing. Those quibbles aside, the dude did alright.
Overall, I find myself in a strange spot with Blackhat, I didn’t mind it as I was watching it, but the more I reflect on it, the more its deficiencies become apparent, and the more I realize that it just isn’t all that great. As stated, it’s not terrible, and I maintain that it is perfectly watchable, it’s just not a film that people should go out of their way to see. As a thriller, it’s serviceable enough, if you keep the fast forward button handy, though it is disheartening to see something as utterly mediocre as this come from a filmmaker of Mann’s caliber. This is a director who, with Manhunter, The Insider, and The Last of the Mohicans, has several masterpieces under his belt. Blackhat simply is not one of them.
