SYNOPSIS: A hacker is recruited from prison by the U.S. government to thwart a cyber terrorism plot that has the American and Chinese governments pointing fingers at each other.
REVIEW: Blackhat should feel more relevant than it actually is, given its timely release after the Sony hack with its ties to North Korea. Instead, we never feel the weight of the events transpiring and the importance of the themes it attempts to explore.
Perhaps its the one dimensionality of the characters that keeps their motives and actions all too predictable and cliché. At the center is Nick Hathaway, played by Chris Hemsworth. It isn’t that he is phoning in this performance. There just isn’t anything all too fresh and original with his arc. He’s the convict making a deal to clear his name, gets caught in the middle of a plot that is bigger than expected, and finds himself on the run whilst trying to solve the mystery at hand. There really isn’t much time to discover anything deep inside the character, and Hemsworth hardly cracks a smile or breaks a sweat the entire film, and so his performance feels flat.
Predictable “love interest” moments are forced into the film, reminding us that ultimately we are at the mercy of a standard Hollywood formula, so there really isn’t any risk taking or controversy with what we are seeing on screen. This begs the question of what the point of even making this movie was? What lessons have we learned by the end? How has our knowledge been enriched? I couldn’t answer that.
The supporting characters aren’t particularly memorable, and the “bad guy” isn’t nearly as creative and savvy once we meet him in person as we are expecting from all the “cyber hacking” scenes we are privy to throughout the film.
Those types of scenes – the ones where drama is supposed to come out of characters sitting at computer terminals entering code and typing away – are always a pet peeve. To pull them off, you better have an interesting plot surrounding all that typing, otherwise all the energy of the film deflates, as is the case here.
To get the cyber geniuses away from the desk and into the field, the film steals a formula brilliantly executed by an excellent movie about hacking that came out in the early 1990’s called Sneakers, where “low tech” solutions are applied to high tech problems. In the case of Blackhat, it’s tracking down the whereabouts of the antagonist so they can physically go in and capture or kill him. Again, it’s a Hollywood convention that’s been done, much better, before.
Director Michael Mann does bring a level of visual interest to his scenes, most notably where there’s action, utilizing his signature steadicam and POV shots to give the audience the feeling of being there when the danger is heightened. Hand to hand fights are choreographed notably well, and you really do feel the impact of bullets whizzing by.
The film rushes to its conclusion once the mission has been completed, leaving the fate of Hathaway ambiguous. If this were a more clever film, I would say this was intentional. But in this case, if they can’t be bothered to tell us what happens to our main character at the end, we can’t be bothered to care at all, and shouldn’t give this movie a second thought.
GRADE: D