Delayed Reaction: Blackhat

Premise: A devastatingly handsome hacker tries to stop another hacker from hacking.

I’m not in the cult of Michael Mann, but I do agree that he’s good at making a certain kind of watchable movie. He’s a filmmaker whose films I saw before I really considered who directed them. Heat, Collateral, Ali, and Public Enemies I saw because they looked good. Mann wasn’t a brand to me. He is that now, thanks in large part to the Blank Check podcast forcing me to consider his filmography as a whole. My take on him now is that he makes big movies that should work but don’t always. You’d think for how much people like Heat, Collateral, and The Last of the Mohicans now that he’d have even one movie that broke $100 million at the box office, but he doesn’t*.

 

*Barely. His highest grosser is Public Enemies at $97 million and you could make some arguments with inflation adjustment. The greater point is that he has no blockbusters.

 

Blackhat is a rather impressive extreme of the Michael Mann experience. It’s a massive box office bomb. The kind that’s hard to ever predict. I mean, Heat fans alone should’ve gotten that movie above $10 million, right? Seven years later, Blackhat doesn’t look that different than his other films. It’s a nice reminder of how much timing and ad campaigns can really matter sometimes.

 

Anyway, the movie is a little ridiculous but ultimately entertaining. I love Hollywood’s obsession with making hackers cool. I’m not saying that a hacker has to be a nerd at a computer. They tend to dress the Chris Hemsworth role up a little more though. Typically he’s a spy who just happens to be the world’s best hacker. In this, he’s just a hacker who happens to also be an action movie star. And whatever that accent was, I’m asking that he never bring it back.

 

The movie does what it can to dress up a fairly dry topic. I mean, any time “soy futures” are mentioned as part of a masterplan, it’s going to be an uphill battle. Solid cast though. Viola Davis as stern authority figure and Holt McCallany as exhausted law enforcement officer play to their strengths. The rest of the cast is nicely international. Michael Man knows how to make this kind of action movie, even if the details of the hacking and technology escape him.

 

Look, I didn’t follow a lot of the movie. It was entertaining enough though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend