This is one of those movies to catch on TV in a year. On TV, you can change channels if it is bad. This seems like any of a number TV series going around. Take out your Michael Mann bingo cards, folks. The 71-year-old director, considered one of the great movie stylists of his generation, has directed modern crime classics (“Heat”), romantic melodramas (“The Last of the Mohicans”), one of the most beautiful digital movies of the last decade (“Miami Vice” — give it another try) and is capable of delivering A-grade Hollywood fare of a very high order (“Ali,” “The Insider”). Mann produced one of the iconic crime shows of the 1980s (“Miami Vice”) and one of the most underrated (“Crime Story”). And bits of all of them are in the exceptionally disappointing “Blackhat,” starring Chris “Thor” Hemsworth as the single best-looking hacker since Angelina Jolie (“Hackers,” we will never forget you). Lots of blue light? Yes. Dedicated cops versus a relentless criminal mastermind? Yep. A morally ambiguous lead with a heart of gold torn between the thrill of the game and the love of a woman? Yes. Chicago accents? Helicopters? Speed boats? Exotic locales? Thunderous gunbattle? All there. “Blackhat” is a frustrating jumble of Mann tics, frustrating because when bits of classic Mann style pop in, from the kernel of a good story to the occasionally breathtakingly beautiful shot, it simply reminds you what a mess the rest of it is. And the frustration starts almost immediately. “Blackhat,” written by first-time screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl, opens with a riff on one of the corniest sequences in contemporary cinema: the zoom-in on a computer’s wiring and circuits to show the movement of data. But this is Mann, so we go further, into the microscopic lattice of the chip itself. There is one graceful moment, a single white light indicating a data breach. Had we not seen the rest, it would have been elegant and chilling. But no. This turns out to be quite a breach — a couple of them, in fact. When two hacks with similar code cause both a meltdown at a Chinese nuclear plant and a baffling run-up in soy futures, the FBI teams up with Chinese intelligence to track down the “blackhat” hacker. Turns out that part of the code was co-written as a lark by a Chinese security officer named Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom) when he was an undergrad at MIT. His partner? Convicted hacker Nicholas Hathaway (Hemsworth, rolling out one of the worst Chicago accents in recent memory), whom Chen Dawai persuades the U.S. government to release (supervised by an under-used Viola Davis) so they can catch the baddie. So, wedded to a rickety story, we bounce from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and beyond, knitting together the sort of hacking that usually takes days but is reduced to a more cinematic matter of seconds and the occasionally blurry fight scene. Perhaps channeling Thor a little more than was required, Hemsworth works harder than any hacker you’ve ever met, while Chen Dawai’s systems engineer sister (“Lust, Caution’s” Tang Wei) hangs around and causes friction between the partners (This was more or less what Gong Li did in “Miami Vice,” for those with their bingo cards.) Mercifully, there are a few arresting images and sequences. Check out the gorgeous aerial shots of Hong Kong (a master shot above an open-air market, the tents looking like dominoes between massive buildings, particularly resonates) and, as if trying to top the sound of the immortal gunbattle in “Heat,” a shoot-out in a concrete tunnel results in overwhelmingly, almost tangibly loud gunfire. But most of “Blackhat” is a clunky, clumsy mess, and not just story-wise. Cinephiles have been driven to drink trying to figure out why Mann — known for stunningly crisp images and striking color palette — seems to have fallen in love with the muddier end of hi-def digital video. One understands the need for a filmmaker to experiment, but when the results have the look and rhythm of consumer-grade video (an otherwise strongly choreographed gunbattle especially suffers), one turns to the script and plot and performances for solace. Here, one will not find it. ‘Blackhat’ Grade: C Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei Rating: R for violence and some language Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 14:00:09 +0000
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