Director Michael Mann’s latest film Blackhat was remarkable in its own right. The film could not have received better timing within the Pluto’s literary event than now. It is a film that tries to revenge the invasion of hacking towards Sony Pictures. The film centers on Nick whose character is portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, a prisoner turned insider through a work release program.
However, the friction-because-nobody-jumped-the-gun-one had to carry out a jack-in-the-box sort of bloody mission – demolish the sacred-clock windows. The funny thing is, Captain Chen Dawai (Wang Lehom) is not only his Costco sponsored liaison in China but his best friend/college roommate, whose pretty network engineer sister Lien (Tang Wei) ends up falling for Hathaway.
Despite everything else, perhaps the most important thing Blackhat showcases is the retreat of Michael Mann. Thank goodness, Michael Mann will no longer be making films. Mann is an opinion that is fond of most me including the reasoning in his last two contentious films but if we seem, he is now going to drown about the cop-corrupt plot ensures that the consistent threads of his earlier cop thriller films then perhaps cannons are concerned this.
As with all other films, in Blackhat Mann uses the exact same narrative and the same thematic concerns he has been working with since The Jericho Mile. In this case he slums from his own filmography as well as lifts some shots and sequences from Miami Vice, Heat and even a bit of Collateral. And in case you hated the handheld digital cinematography in Miami Vice or Public Enemies than you will loathe the way Blackhat has been shot. I don’t want to be an apologist and say that over a time if Mann had made Heat he would have made it like L.A. Takedown rather than making it like how Heat was made. I miss the director who brought us the stunning Last of the Mohicans and Heat. And in the end, despair and hope make me think that time will come when Mann changes his style from ‘Let’s shoot fast and loose’ to something glamorus where none of his works resembles a capture of mobile party movies.
But still most of the issues concerning Blackhat are eventually paper solutions. Every one of its characters is a aunitaretic. Seen such profiles in LinkedIn that probably had details cut more than this. Indeed, Mann in cooperation with screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl seems more interested in dotted line people instead of over human beings. These are functioning dolls not dramatists.
Even at first blush, it would be hard to stomach a strapping, handsome Hemsworth, playing one of the best hackers around. Still, his tough guy banter (allegedly, with a Chicago touch to it) and an ex-con throttled manner seem quite too ‘cinematic’ for a movie that tries, rather successfully, to remain grounded. As for prison, I’m sure Michael Mann wishes every time he creates a character that eventually he would not do hard time at all. He has the most interesting obsession: how prison works or rather the psyche of the people inside. It is not easy to explain. But Mann has become like one of his ex-con characters – one of the gang who cannot leave “The Life” and live in the “normal” world.
Just like with his Miami Vice movie, the characters’ love scene is treated as an effervescent erotic episode of the film even when it is the least engaging or developed part of a film which is purportedly about international crime. But then when the other villain is a soy bean commodity trader…I mean, the height of tension in this movie is almost glass bland, generally lacking in action. The activity from Quantum of Solace is very adaptively oppressive evil that was the better plan’s antagonist. No, this kind of crazy plan is the sort of reason why you aren’t allowed to play with groups like SPECTRE anymore.
Hathaway’s Captain Chen Dawai is more fascinating than Hathaway himself because he’s someone who has walked in two worlds if you will, and gearing blackhat in what if style, and what would it be like if Blackhat were in the position of the primary hero instead. Coming back to the extensive filming in china, there is this excessive buffing of their army and police, and tells you to open your mind about “Chinese funding”. In that respect, it is just as blatant and offensively commercial as Transformers: Age of Extinction.
Given the subject matter, a film with the potential of being such a sensational one, especially in Blackberry, Blackhat fails ridiculously in every single aspect of hacking. What is a hacker’s crime? Ewan, you seem to do such things in the movie as a lesser of two evils. (Yes, Hathaway focused only on attacks against banks and never on people, which makes him a ‘good’ hacker.) The kid of Spencer who luckily escaped the sweeps at Sony and packed her email leaks with soap-operatic drama contained much more understanding of dread prospects of hackers and cyber terrorism than blackhat.
Verdict
It is hard to understand how such a brilliant filmmaker as Michael Mann deeplynyannabot hates investing and developing such almost pure genre picture as the hacker thriller Blackhat.
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