BLACKHAT (2015)

Genre: Crime/Thriller
Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei, Wang Leehom, John Ortiz, Viola Davis, Simon McBurney, Maxine Peake, Harry Lloyd, Charlotte Hope, Georg Nikoloff, Kenton Hall
RunTime: 2 hrs 13 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Scene of Intimacy and Some Coarse Language)
Released By: UIP
Official Website: http://www.blackhat-thefilm.com/

Opening Day: 15 January 2015

Synopsis: Set within the world of global cybercrime, Legendary's Blackhat follows a furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners as they hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta.

Movie Review:

Never had we thought that we would describe a Michael Mann film as dull, but ‘Blackhat’ has just earned that credit. Even though its premise seems ripe to tap into the paranoid zeitgeist of today’s Digital Age, Mann’s cyberthriller is an interminable bore for a ponderous 135 minutes, so much so that we wonder whether this is the same director who gave us such gripping dramas as ‘Heat’, ‘The Insider’ and ‘Collateral’. And yet, ‘Blackhat’ possesses many distinctive Mann-isms – from the fluorescent-tinged visuals of the Hong Kong night sky to the familiar synthesiser score by Atticus Ross and Leo Ross to the cheesy display of machismo – that it is difficult to imagine anyone else at the helm.

A good place as any to start with just why ‘Blackhat’ is that dull is first-time screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl’s script. Admittedly, Foehl does have an interesting hook in exploring the notion of the modern-day criminal, who assisted by technology, can unleash lethal damage to unsuspecting targets from anywhere and anyplace in the world. These criminal acts can be as unrelated as a nuclear core meltdown in Hong Kong to an artificial run in soy futures on the U.S. commodities market, and yet be linked to motives as vast as plain old simple greed to politics and even to religion. The former forms the prologue establishing the “blackhat”, meaning a hacker with malicious intent, which Mann gooses for maximum visual impact – in a single unbroken take, he dramatises the attack from a macro to micro perspective, culminating in a CG-ed representation of the plant’s computer systems, where little blue dots become a flurry of white ones as the malware takes over.

Assembled to investigate the attack is Chinese agent Chen Dawei (Wang LeeHom), who realises early on that part of the code used to break into the Chai Wan nuclear plant was that written by him and a former MIT classmate, Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), back in their campus days. Besides forming an alliance with the FBI, led by agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), Dawei makes a request to the U.S. Department of Justice to have Nicholas, now serving time at a federal penitentiary for breaking into some of the country’s financial institutions, to be released from prison. It takes one to beat one, but besides Hathaway, Dawei also enlists the assistance of his sister, Chen Lien (Tang Wei), who also happens to be a computer expert.

Following a template of a procedural, their investigation will lead them from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Malaysia and finally to Indonesia, though most of the time is spent in the former two locations – it is also in Hong Kong that the team will receive some help from the local police, including Andy On and our very own Adrian Pang. With Stuart Dryburgh’s digital cinematography, Mann tries his best to jazz up every single frame on the screen, and to his credit, makes the film look and sound more engaging than it really is. Besides the technobabble the characters are occasionally made to indulge in, this is as straightforward a narrative as any, where the good guys remain good and the bad guys, well, waiting to be hunted and, in some cases, hunted down.  

Most crucially, Foehl makes some unfathomable narrative choices which severely undermine what sense of verisimilitude Mann tries to achieve in his shooting. In between reading copious lines of code, Nicholas takes down three baddies in a Korean restaurant in L.A.’s Korea-town, picks up a gun and joins a gunfight as if he were an FBI agent, and romances Dawei’s sister in one of the most chemistry-free romances we’ve seen in recent time. That’s not all – the final act has him, now a wanted fugitive by the National Security Agency, and Lien, make their way from Hong Kong to Malaysia and then to Indonesia and tracking down the elusive mastermind right in his very backyard using just a sharpened screwdriver and a knife, with not a single officer of the law in either country in pursuit. Any movie flirts with a certain suspension of disbelief, but Mann’s obsessive insistence on realism just makes the leaps of logic (and credibility) so painfully obvious here.

In between clunky lines of exposition, Mann fumbles with some of the most unimpressive staging we’ve seen in any of his movies. Any conceivable tension between the security agencies of China and the U.S is hinted at but quickly swept away, presumably in the name of political correctness (in order for the script to be cleared for shooting by the Chinese authorities). A shootout right outside the Quarry Bay MTR station sees Carol and fellow agent Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany) have almost perfect aim while the baddies (led by the nondescript Eastern European-looking Ritchie Coster) can’t seem to get much of a hit even with automatic sprays of gunfire. And as if Foehl’s revelation of the mastermind and his motivations weren’t anti-climactic enough, Mann underscores the monotony with a ludicrous showdown in the middle of a street festival in Jakarta where all its performers seem unfrazzled by a couple of White people walking amidst them in the opposite direction until shots are fired.

Mann’s choice to shoot in the same over-exposed, sometimes low-resolution, mode as ‘Collateral’ and ‘Miami Vice’ is alternately mesmerising and frustrating. The latter is particularly so in the Korea-town fistfight, which looks like it was shot and edited on a cameraphone made five years ago; nonetheless, the same technique looks great in capturing the melange of neon-lit signboards that dot Hong Kong’s Kowloon streets. There’s no denying that Mann remains a formidable visual stylist, but one wishes he could have chosen cleaner and more well composed shots to go with the ‘Heat’-style gun battles at the very least. Largely though, Mann sustains a moody intrigue throughout the film, complimented by a timely pulsating score by the same people who made David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’ sound sleek.

But these are minor consolations in a film that gets increasingly laughable in its self-seriousness, both in terms of character and narrative. It is also, like we mentioned at the start, mind-numbingly dull, content to unfold at the same languorous pace for more than two hours. Besides being a complete waste of time, it is also a wasted opportunity, failing to seize the perfect timing afforded to it by real-world events for a tense but thoughtful action thriller about the vulnerabilities of our systems to ‘blackhats’. Coming from Mann, it is a huge let-down, and we might say, no better than the B-movie yarn that the similarly-themed thrillers ‘The Net’ and ‘Hackers’ were in the 90s.

Movie Rating:

(An exercise in the usual Michael Mann visual excess and nothing more – this dull and shockingly inept cyber-crime thriller squanders a prime opportunity to tap into the paranoid zeitgeist)

Review by Gabriel Chong