Blackhat

Blackhat (15)

USA 2015 133 mins Dir: Michael Mann Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei, Wang Leeholm, Viola Davis, Ritchie Coster

Cyber thriller Blackhat marks the unfortunate stage in director Michael Mann’s career where he tips into self-parody. Mechanically lining up the night-time cityscapes, brooding masculine anti-heroes and thunderous shootouts that we’ve come to expect from the director of Heat, The Insider and Collateral, the film almost plays as a greatest hits collection, heavy on atmospheric style but with nothing going on between its ears.

It’s a peculiar regression for a director once famed for fusing keen intelligence with visceral thrills. What’s even more galling is the topicality of the script, written by Morgan Davis Foehl, could and should have struck a terrifyingly plausible chord post the Sony Interview hacking scandal. The film actually begins brilliantly with a near-silent opening sequence as the electronic network of a Hong Kong nuclear power plant is surreptitiously hacked by a shadowy figure. Mann takes the cliché of the camera-zooming-through-the-motherboard-sequence and amplifies it, practically burrowing down into the fibreoptics before zooming back out and capturing the chillingly explosive consequences of the hacker’s actions.

It’s an audacious statement of the vulnerability engendered by our inter-connected modern world. Sadly, nothing that follows lives up to this dynamic opening. In one of the most amusingly absurd casting decisions of recent years, Chris Hemsworth plays an imprisoned, uber-buff cyber hacker named Hathaway who’s enlisted to help the American and Chinese authorities track down the deadly ‘blackhat’ of the title (a designated term for a cyber-criminal, derived from Western conventions). This involves teaming up with Viola Davis’ hard-bitten FBI agent and Wang Leehom’s Chinese official, all the while falling in love with the latter’s sister (played by Tang Wei).

Hemsworth, so wonderfully charismatic in the likes of Thor, The Avengers and Rush, all of which made a virtue out of his beefy physique, is hopelessly unbelievable as the hacker with a six pack who proves himself a lover and a fighter. But it’s unfair to place the blame solely at his feet given that the script never really attempts to define Hathaway as a character, leaving him a blank slate as he charges around the Far East whilst sensitively bedding Wei’s doe-eyed heroine.

In truth, none of the characters have any depth, bar Davis’ character’s fleeting admission that she lost her husband in tragic circumstances. But it hardly matters since the film ultimately drops any pretence of political relevance and reveals itself as little more than a cheesy good vs. evil thriller, albeit one dressed up in Mann’s visually dynamic digital cinematography.

Indeed, atmosphere is one thing the movie has in droves. No-one shoots a helicopter flying over a cityscape like Mann does, and it would be a hard-bitten customer who doesn’t at least get caught up in the sleek splendour of it all, the digital visuals, paradoxically, lending a gripping sense of immediacy where the narrative and characters are sorely lacking. Add in two or three genuinely exciting – and deafening – action sequences and the movie has just enough to pass muster as a superficial treat for the eyes and ears, if not the brain. You just expect a lot more from this filmmaker.