Tuesday, January 20, 2015

CSI: Ad Hoc Cyber Unit

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-
 
 photo blackhatNEW_zps394f9ac5.jpg

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