Critic's Grade: C-
Never mind Thor's ability to fly and channel lightning. Forget about George Kirk's ability to fly a spacecraft, or James Hunt's mastery of high-speed automotive races. In Blackhat, Chris Hemsworth puts his previous roles to shame by portraying a dude who can type, like, 250 words per minute.
As Nicholas Hathaway, Hemsworth types the living shit out of so many computers, you might imagine the film's budget at the Apple Store matched Hemsworth's salary. He types so hard and so passionately that, half the time, he's too distracted to finish buttoning his shirt, the neon glow of his computer screen glistening against his chiseled chest. He types post-coitus. He types in private jets and while power-walking. The man's ability to type knows no bounds.
Sequences of aggressive typing and pensive web-searching have been the bane of cyber thrillers since their inception. From WarGames to The Net to Blackhat, cinema has been trying hard to remain up-to-date with technology by making the act of typing really, really exciting. It never is.
So what happens when you put a cyber thriller in the hands of Michael Mann, one of the most kinetic filmmakers of his generation? Here's a man who can make the paranoid boardroom scenes of The Insider crackle with the same intensity as the extended heist sequence of Heat. Well, all that Googling and 10-key mayhem gets treated like a gunfight. Mann begins his film inside a computer, with a sequence reminiscent of Fight Club's opening credit animation, yet instead of ending at the barrel of a gun, it winds up on a keyboard. Shots of Hemsworth typing are filmed from every angle possible, including from inside the keyboard, where the keys depress and energy lights everything up. And it's…well, it's pretty stupid, actually.
Why is Hemsworth typing? Well, an anonymous cyber terrorist has struck a nuclear reactor in China and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (previously known as the "Chicago Butter and Egg Board"). When a joint task force from the U.S. and China—led by Barrett (Viola Davis) and Chen (Leehom Wang)—can't track down the culprit, Chen remembers his brilliant college roommate, Hathaway. The only trouble is that Hathaway has been in prison for 15 years—because, duh, he used his typing for criminal purposes.
An agreement is reached, and soon the UN of sexy nerds is off traveling the globe, looking at computer screens in Indonesia and China as Hemsworth beds Chen's sister and growls unintelligible dialogue that sounds like Sylvester Stallone reading Hacking for Dummies. Every now and again, the group gets into shaky-cam gunfights that remind you we're watching a Michael Mann movie (in addition to being a computer whiz, Hathaway is also a skilled marksman, master of hand-to-hand combat and wearer of designer sunglasses). At no point is any of this particularly interesting.
Still, being a Mann movie, it's not entirely a bust. The director's filmography—which includes Thief, Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans and Collateral—is marked with an avant-garde approach to genre filmmaking, and with Blackhat, Mann continues to be unhinged. This is a film about people running from location to location in pursuit of intangible information, and one where the central villain doesn't even make himself known—outside of cryptic emails—until well into the final reel. Along with Hemsworth's marble-mouthed delivery, dialogue is often intentionally drowned out by sound. The urban cinematography is beautiful, too: Nobody can shoot a city at night like Mann. But while the flick is unmistakably Mann, that's not enough to make it all that good.
Which is a bloody shame, because there was a time—before the underwhelming Public Enemies and slickly boring Miami Vice rehash—that a new Mann movie was cause for celebration. With Blackhat, he's created his first true throwaway, a self-serious topical thriller that in 10 years will look as outdated as The Net does now. On the plus side, if that whole God of Thunder thing doesn't work out for Hemsworth, at least he has a promising career in data entry.
WWeek 2015