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It isn't easy to make using a computer exciting, no matter how hard someone types. The likelihood of you loving Michael Mann’s 11th feature Blackhat has nothing to do with your tolerance for furious keyboarding or technobabble. No, if you embrace this movie it’s because you’re here for conceptual Michael Mann. Until the mid-2000s, the director specialized in gripping crime movies about men who are alone; you experienced them with your heart. There are moments in his filmography that welcomed (and maybe even benefited from) a conceptual reading, like pairing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in 1996’s Heat, but the movie doesn’t need it to sustains its energy or get its points across. Miami Vice (2006) is the first real entry real conceptual Mann movie. Some critics likened it to Terrence Malick, and they read decisions like the use of body doubles during sex scenes as support for the film’s exploration of identity. I’m not here for conceptual Michael Mann.
If you dig, Blackhat is about the porousness of certain borders (word to David Foster Wallace). It’s about technology and globalization and the collapse of boundaries between bodies, nations, and objects in the Internet-driven 21st century. The film opens in China, at a nuclear reactor that’s being overtaken by a sinister tech genius. Mann dramatizes the hacking of the plant’s computers with abstract CGI renderings of computer guts. A single dot of light on, what?, a motherboard?, becomes the entry point for an infection (or malware payload, if you’re hip to the hip talk). The infection crashes the system and causes a meltdown. The Chinese government puts a Top Man, Leehom Wang’s Chen Dawai, on the job, and Dawai joins forces with the U.S. government to crack the code and stop future attacks.
The first 15 or 20 minutes of the movie is all “get the gang together” plotting. Upon getting his orders, Dawai immediately brings his sister, Lien (played by Wei Tang) onto the team, but the most important player Dawai needs also happens to be the biggest item on Blackhat’s conceptual checklist: Chris Hemsworth. He plays an MIT-educated hacker named Hathaway who’s built like Thor, obviously, and is doing time for fucking up some banks. Like all of Mann’s men, Hathaway has a code—“I don’t burn people,” he explains—and as is the case in many of Mann’s movies, he’s a means to express empathy for ex-cons. (This has been a chief concern of the filmmaker since his first feature, 1981’s Thief; he’s one of the only mainstream directors who regularly asks the audience to hear about the struggles the formerly incarcerated experience in this country.)
Hemsworth isn’t very good. In fact, he’s distractingly bad. He’s got signature Mann dialogue, like some early rough talk about Santa Claus for the guards behind bars, but his approximation of an American accent is baffling when it isn’t just laughable. Is it supposed to be Boston? New York? There’s no telling. On a conceptual level, you can read this as a way the film illustrates the breakdown of borders. By unpacking this non-American performer’s failed, and thus impossible to ignore, performance of American-ness, you can think further about the movie’s themes: fluid nationality, holes in identity widened by global capitalism and the reach of the Internet. You can also think about his body as an object.
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But that reading doesn’t leave much room for emotion. The director’s earlier, better work, like Heat and The Last of the Mohicans, overflows with emotion. New York magazine’s Bilge Ebiri tweeted recently about revisiting Heat and crying multiple times—that’s real and true. No one is going to cry during Blackhat.
Still, it’s not without moments of grace. The best scene is just Hathaway, newly released from prison to help catch the bad guys, standing on the tarmac at an airport, taking in the scene: the heat shimmering from the ground, the traffic lines painted below the undulating air, the nature glimpsed off in the distance. It’s calm, something that Mann understands just as well as he does exceptionally loud gunfire. Two of Heat’s greatest moments are defined by silence: the falling and shimmering blue banner at the car dealership before the armored car heist; and the ecstatic moment of unreal quiet when Al Pacino’s character Vincent Hanna rushes down the stairs at a hospital to chase down a bank robber, and his footfalls vanish from the soundtrack while the score swells. It’s no surprise, then, that Blackhat succeeds when it's hushed.
If you want surprises, though, look to Viola Davis’s performance as gruff FBI agent Carol Barrett—she handles Mann’s self-consciously tough dialogue a thousand times better than any of her castmates. Wei Tang is impressive as a computer wiz from the financial sector, brother to our Chinese Top Man, and eventual love interest of Hathaway. She’s more active than Mann’s early female parts, and actually expresses grief and anger. She makes you feel things, whereas Hemsworth is a stone bust of a person with a thick tongue that you can use to bolster an argument. It’s a valid pursuit. I love a formalist reading. But when you know what Michael Mann is capable of when he isn’t recycling scenarios and lines, when he’s casting capable performers like James Caan, Dennis Farina, and Dennis Haysbert, it makes it hard to muster enthusiasm for a sub-par product. After 2009’s Public Enemies and now Blackhat, the best living American crime director is on a losing streak.
Ross Scarano is a deputy editor at Complex. He never wanted a regular type life, and tweets about it here.
