Cyber-terrorism is the subject of
Michael Mann’s latest crime thriller ‘Blackhat,’ starring Chris Hemsworth as a
computer programming genius pulled out of jail by the FBI to stop an elusive
hacker who caused a nuclear reactor in Hong Kong to overheat and manipulated
soy futures on the stock market (you heard right, soy). On the heels of the recent Sony hacks by
the self-proclaimed “Guardians of Peace,” the timing of ‘Blackhat’ couldn’t
have been better. It is therefore unfortunate that
the movie misfired so badly.
‘Blackhat’ is a bland and
vanilla CBS-style procedural that defies our belief even as it tries our
patience. Each time the mysterious hacker
taps the ‘Return’ key with dramatic flourish, we get a microscopic view as the
electrical impulse zig-zags from his keyboard through wires and other electronic
components across vast distances before it achieves its intended mayhem at the
destination. It gets boring after you
see it just once. Then there’s the
unlikely casting of Chris Hemsworth as the outlaw hacker-turned-savior Nicholas
Hathaway, who delivered a performance so wooden and flat that you can’t help
but wonder why the CSA chose the Thor actor for the role to begin with. Even if the story falls short, we can usually count on Michael Mann (‘Heat,’ ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ ‘Collateral’)
to make up for it with his trademark action sequences, but his
over-reliance on shaky/shifty camerawork (unsteady cam), grainy images and rapid close-ups only made ‘Blackhat’ seem unnecessarily schlocky.
Anything else? Where do I start? Well, there’s the unlikely
ad hoc team of cyber-sleuths comprised of a convicted felon, a couple of
Chinese cyber ‘experts,’ an FBI agent and a US Marshal on whom catching the cyber-mastermind
depended upon, a contrived romance between Hathaway and the pretty Chinese
network engineer (Tang Wei) who tagged along on the team for no other reason than to give Hemsworth's character a stock "love interest," the uneven pace of the
movie, the weak plot (I still don’t know what the hacker’s up to when the movie
ended) and the WTF climax occurring at a crowded festival in Jakarta. Oh, did I also mention the movie is just plain boring? Mann is so much better than this.
Grade: C-
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