Have you ever had an IT guy try to explain to you what’s wrong with your computer, when all you want is for him to fix it? Suffering through technobabble is a ritual in sci-fi or spy movies, but it’s usually mitigated with some wit, or dazzling performances or flashy action. Unfortunately, and shockingly, when you get through the dull blocks of text about IP routing and encrypted code, your reward is to spend more time with uninteresting, unknowable “good guys” tasked with finding and stopping an unseen villain. Blackhat is directed by Michael Mann, who was for decades a cutting-edge stylist. I fear Mr Mann has fallen victim to a syndrome that affects a great many artists. He was told he was a genius for so long that he started to believe it, and has begun making aesthetic choices so off the wall that no one dare tell him to stop now.
Like his last picture, Public Enemies, Mann chooses to shoot with a type of video that has less of the “snap” of famed early adopter Steven Soderbergh, but looks more like clips from your Uncle Bob’s camcorder that he picked up at J&R Music World in 1991. As a point of comparison, there is a mid-film, street-level machine gun fight in Blackhat, just as there is in Mann’s slicker-than-slick alpha-male epic Heat. I really don’t think I’m being a luddite, resistant to change. The earlier footage still dazzles, this new one looks like a previsualisation test to help the film crew prepare.
The unsavoury aesthetics aside, there’s the sheer stupidity of the story. Blackhat can’t decide if it is a grim, realistic story from the trenches or cyberwarfare or a giddy, “who cares if that makes sense?” Bond film. The frequent flip-flops are aggravating, as is the apparent mandate that every actor on set must deliver their lines as if they were the most bored people on planet Earth. There is one instant, one fraction of a second, in which Viola Davis is allowed to let a tiny bit of humanity sneak into her performance. This slurp of oxygen may do more damage than good, as it serves to reinforce the lifelessness of her co-stars.
The lead of the picture is Chris Hemsworth, a frequently shirtless computer genius. (When we meet him he’s in prison, so he has plenty of time to do pushups and has limited access to geek essentials like Pepsi and Cheez Doodles, I guess.) A Chinese nuclear plant is hacked, seemingly for no reason. Then a bug in the commodities exchange tinkers with the price of soy futures. A Chinese egghead named Chen (Wang Leehom) finds a link between the two events and, as an envoy working with the American government, is able to convince the Department of Justice to spring Hemsworth to help them track down the baddie before he strikes again. Chen also brings along his sister, so Hemsworth can have a few love scenes and take his shirt off some more.
Our band of cyber-detectives proceed to grimace their way from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta, with some stops along the way. For about a minute, you think this is going to be an east-meets-west buddy picture, but it doesn’t really follow up on that. By and large, the Chinese government looks real good in Blackhat, no surprise with the script approval usually required to film there, as Mann did. (Of note, both Hong Kong and Macau are both referred to, by Americans, as “China”.)
Yet Blackhat is not wholly without merit. Even with the gross video stock, Mann knows where to put the camera and has an eye for lighting. An early moment of Hemsworth amid a bank of processors resembles a James Turrell exhibition. There are some new and clever ideas on how to frame people tapping at keyboards in a visually interesting manner. (Blackhat maybe marks the first movie with a POV shot from underneath the keys.) The film’s final third does ramp up the action, shaking loose from any pretence of being realistic, and takes advantage of its exotic setting. The ludicrousness of the villain’s Lex Luthor-like masterscheme is laughable, as is the idea that our heroes would be able to secure fake passports, make quick transit from Malaysia to Indonesia and find a safe house, but not think to acquire a firearm.
If Hemsworth would just smile a bit more and not garble his lines like a doped-up Sly Stallone, maybe I’d have bought the preposterous plot. And maybe if each action sequence didn’t look dim and smeary and “uncinematic” in that wretched video I would have accepted the performances as “restrained and nuanced”. But put these three problems together, and you’ve written some pretty malicious code.
- Blackhat is released in US on 16 January, the UK on 20 February and Australia on 26 February
