Review: ‘Blackhat’

Michael Mann is back with this first movie since 2009’s “Public Enemies,” a cybercrime mystery thriller called “Blackhat” featuring characters furiously pounding away at computer keyboards and lots of talk about random access terminals and code writing and servers, and somehow this leads to shoot outs and murders and other real world things.

A cyber criminal hacker person causes an accident at a Chinese power plant and a Chinese government agent specializing in cyber security type stuff named Chen (Leehom Wang) is tasked with finding this hacker. For reasons not important enough to relay, he teams up with the American government, specifically the FBI, to embark on a worldwide manhunt. And to assist them, he manages to convince the US Government to release a convicted hacker named Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) and he becomes part of the team, along with for some reason Chen’s sister (Wei Tang), and they are off to the races, trying to locate and stop this criminal before his next big strike.

Most of the movie is kind of like an elongated television episode of a show that could be called “Law & Order: Cyber Crimes” or something like that. It is very much a procedural, with a small group of people putting together the clues and taking some risks in order to get more clues about who their target could be, and with a couple of little twists and turns along the way to try to keep things interesting and moving along. And of course they gotta throw in a little bit of a romance in there because what’s a movie without two people falling in love and complicating matters? A bunch of bullshit, that’s what.

Obviously this movie is trafficking in some themes that are very relevant to our current lives. The whole thing is about how computers and the internet and all of these things that we use can easily be turned against us and used for ill-gotten gains by people who would have no compunction for doing so. Just think back to the last couple of years and all the stories about how big corporations like retailers and banks have had their private information hacked into and stolen, causing panic at just about every level. Think about the SONY hack and all the sensitive information and product that was leaked. Do you know about Stuxnet? That directly inspired Michael Mann to make this movie in the first place. This is very real stuff and unlike the initial wave of “hacker” movies we got back in the 1990’s, the hackery things done in this movie and the consequences feel immediate and plausible in our day and age.

So then why isn’t “Blackhat” more exciting or compelling? It has its fair share of Michael Mann-isms, what with the synthy musical choices and shots of people looking out over a city at night and some well done, intense shoot outs and obligatory likely doomed romance. But the actual relationships and characters within this framework just didn’t draw me in. This Hathaway guy has no real depth to him. We know he’s smart cause he went to MIT, which is where he met Chen in the first place, and we know he’s a genius coder and hacker and whatever. We also know that he’s fine with doing prison time cause he knows what he did was wrong so he’s not a dick about that. And then what? He’s only going after the bad guy because if they don’t catch him then he has to go back to prison to complete his sentence, but then something happens late in the movie to make it personal for him to find the guy. Otherwise he’s a nothing, a cypher, a person barely explored, which is a problem because he’s our lead character. Chen is slightly more interesting, having been raised in New York and now working in China, but then again, the most we know about this guy is that he is close to his sister and trusts her and that he was good friends with Hathaway before he went to prison.

Actually, there WAS one moment, when these two characters see each other for the first time when Hathaway gets out of prison and they have a long embrace, speaking in soft voices about how good it was see each other, and at that moment it felt like this movie was going to be more about THEIR relationship, know what I mean? wink wink nudge nudge? They were COLLEGE friends, after all. What do people do in college but experiment, amiright America? But I guess they were just bro-ing it out for a minute there because that sense of extreme closeness between the two of them never really pops up again. Sure they are friends, but it doesn’t seem like much more. I’m just saying it seems like the greeting was way too intense for the way they act towards each other for the rest of the film. Maybe “Blackhat” should have been about their past secret romance and how it complicates things now, what with them being on opposite sides of the law yet on the same team. I guess that’s what the sister is for, and that’s another case of a character just not being defined at all, so when emotions start to get involved, their isn’t much to be invested with, as we don’t really know who this person is or what she wants, outside of helping everyone catch this guy because her brother asked for her help.

Same goes with the eventual reveal of the bad guy, who is just some hairy sweaty dude wearing tropical shirts and who has a weird habit of picking up the computer keyboard and holding it one hand while awkwardly typing into it with the other hand and it feels like something a person wouldn’t do, like NOBODY stands around using a computer keyboard like that. He’s just a dude, and a boring one at that. He kind of reminds me of Dr. Jacoby from “Twin Peaks” but way less interesting.

Which leaves us with just a bunch of plot points and globe trotting and some gun play and a little bit of sexy time and that’s really it. It’s like a long pilot episode for a show in which we will eventually learn more about this Hathaway fella over time, hour by excruciating hour, but instead this is it, this is the whole story, and there really isn’t much there. It definitely feels like a case of Michael Mann being fascinated by the idea of cyber crime and then just throwing in whatever character archetypes were necessary to tell his cyber crime story. It’s not a bad movie, just forgettable. Definitely a minor Michael Mann movie about a blackhat hacker named Hathaway.