Director Michael Mann’s cybercrime thriller is a lot of beautiful sequences that add up to an alarmingly dull whole.
Chris Hemsworth, Wei Tang, and Holt McCallany in Blackhat
Frank Connor/Universal Pictures
Director Michael Mann was making hyper-stylish globalized blockbusters back when the Transformers franchise was but a robot-alien twinkle in Michael Bay's expensive-sunglass-covered eye.
Mann's new film, the hacker thriller Blackhat, feels like a spiritual sequel to his 2006 adaptation of Miami Vice, which, love it or loathe it, often embodied the kind of thrilling, larger-than-life lushness that Mann can do better than anyone else. And Blackhat manages to be even more unmoored and beautiful and remote and empty. It involves a continent-hopping terrorist plot that brings together the FBI, Chinese officials, and a convict released from prison for the occasion. And it is, for the most part, amazingly dull.
Blackhat stars Chris Hemsworth as Nicholas Hathaway (who's referred to by his last name like it's some notorious handle), a man in the middle of serving a decade-plus sentence for his past hacking misdeed when he's furloughed from prison at the insistence of his old MIT roommate, Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), now a security analyst with the Chinese government. A malicious hacker has caused a meltdown on a Chinese nuclear plant using a remote administration tool Hathaway and Chen wrote back in college. Joined by Dawai's network engineer sister Lien (Tang Wei) and — in the spirit of international cooperation — FBI agents Barrett (Viola Davis) and Jessup (Holt McCallany), the team tracks the hacker from the U.S. to Hong Kong and Indonesia.
Frank Connor/Universal Pictures
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