(Scored out of ten; below 5 = not worth seeing, 6 = OK, 7 = good, 8 = great, 9 = fantastic, 10 = next to perfect)
With charismatic actors like Chris Hemsworth and Viola Davis one would think Blackhat would be moderately interesting. It isn’t. The film moves at a plodding pace and the actors look like they’re sleepwalking through the script. Blackhat is completely devoid of emotion and the perfect example of lazy film-making. If boring thrillers with mediocre action are your thing, be my guest. Otherwise, this movie is best left alone.
Blackhat tells the story of a joint American and Chinese task force assigned with locating and taking down a mysterious ‘blackhat’ hacker responsible for blowing up a nuclear power plant and raising the prices of soy products. Due to the hacker’s innate ability to never be found, they employ the help of convict hacker Nicholas Hathoway (Chris Hemsworth). Fights are fought, love is made and money is stolen… but most of the time it’s just people typing gibberish into a computer.
Chris Hemsworth as Nicholas Hathoway
For a movie centered on cyber terrorism, especially at this time when the subject matter is so prevalent, the film is incredibly boring. Michael Mann fails to infuse the movie with any energy whatsoever. It felt like the actors were just as bored as the audience watching the movie. Chris Hemsworth, who has provided a few high energy roles in his career, is completely flat. For whatever reason he elects a strange unknowable accent throughout the film and stumbles through randomly placed love scenes that seem like they were included for the sake of including love scenes. His cast mates do little to help in terms of chemistry so the blame is hardly on Hemsworth alone.
Lead Chinese officer Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) sounds as if he is reading a script every time he opens his mouth and his sister (Wei Tang) has such a thick accent that her English dialogue is barely understood. The entire “love” subplot is shoehorned in and has literally no buildup. Hemsworth and Tang stand on a roof together and decide to have sex… that’s it. It is clear that this is Morgan Davis Foehl’s first time writing a feature length script. Elements come out of left field, context is lost or was never there to begin with and motivations are so thin that it makes you wonder why the government felt the hacker was such a threat in the first place (SPOILERS: he steals 74 million dollars so he can use the money to make more money… so devious, so nefarious, so “I don’t care”).
Leehom Wang and Wei Tang as Chen Dawai and Lien Chen
The negatives don’t stem solely from the cast, a majority of the issues have a lot to do with direction. The camera work is shoddy to say the least. A number of times when nothing interesting is happening (which is often) Mann will zoom in and around Hemsworth or whichever other actor and focus on their face for uncomfortable lengths at a time. It’s a very peculiar decision and makes the film unattractive from a cinematic standpoint in addition to its poor story.
The movie jumps from place to place with no real motivation. The incident that sets the event of the film in motion, the plant explosion, is talked about like it’s no big deal. Someone just put a massive part of your population at risk of radiation exposure and the government reacts at a snail’s pace. Blackhat feels like Michael Mann found a checklist of all the cliché things a thriller needs to be considered a thriller and then decided to systematically cross them off in the least appealing way possible (attractive male lead? Check, but let’s make him super boring. Attractive female lead? Check, but let’s make her even more boring than the guy! Sinister villain? Check, but drop the sinister… or villain, let’s just make him greedy and non-threatening).
Every facet of this film screams lazy, which is unfortunate considering how promising Chris Hemsworth as a leading man can be. Michael Mann’s cyber-thriller fails to connect on every level and shows just how little of the spark Mann has left from his heyday.
Viola Davis in ‘Blackhat’ (the expression says it all)
Overall I give this film 2/10.