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Friday, January 16, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Blackhat
 Mann-splaining, And Privileged Access In Hackdom

Chris Hemsworth as Nick Hathaway in Michael Mann's cyber-drama "Blackhat".  Universal Pictures
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, January 16, 2015

 Michael Mann's "Blackhat" symbolizes all that's wrong with the chronic, skewered Eurocentric entrenchment of many Hollywood films.  The film's mentality is steeped in an I-see-the world-as-deficient to-me-so-therefore-I'm-the-only-one-who-can-save-it-to-the-exclusion-of-all-others. 

"Blackhat" begins with a puzzling three-minute VFX sequence meant to indulge us in the world of cyberhackers.  "Blackhat" signifies a lack of confidence by Mr. Mann, who doesn't know how to start or anchor a wieldy exercise dotted with one-dimensional characters.  The fulcrum of these is Chris Hemsworth's bland hunky hacker Nick Hathaway, a penitentiary-indifferent convicted hacker, whose sentence in Federal prison is commuted.  Nick is sprung to help Viola Davis's team of Feds capture the hackers responsible for the damage to a Far East power plant.

"Blackhat" is steeped in Mr. Mann's tired, rote, ill-fitting camera shots.  Any interest in nameless, faceless hacker perpetrators is eclipsed by glimpses of Mr. Hemsworth's physique and auto-romance with Wei Tang, who plays Chen Lien, an agent on Ms. Davis's team.  Lien's brother Dawai (Leeholm Wang) is an agent who knows Nick from prior exploits.  This tense crew of by-the-bookers tread cautiously.  Only boy wonder Nick knows how to proceed.  There's nothing exceptional about Nick.  Nick bangs on a few keys, and just like that, he's considered primo.  Much of Nick's skill as a hacker is down to others' ready gullibility. 

Anyone familiar with Mr. Mann's films knows his tendency to identify working-class hardscrabble men of industry as lonely, emotionally barren and relentless creatures.  They're devoted to the cause that is work.  They live for it.  Sensitive, even vulnerable souls Mann's men deliberate as Rodin thinkers with ill-intent as the best of their intentions.  Their veins need to be enervated. 

In "Blackhat" Mr. Hemsworth's Nick somewhat continues the trend.  It's Mr. Mann himself who departs.  His directing style and shot-making is relentlessly distracting and forced.  He's searching for his film's pulse but can't find it.  He gets lost along the way, and the film's rhythm becomes increasingly desperate and discordant.  Body cameras, digital shakes and over the shoulder shots predominate and it all feels showy, dizzying and disorienting. 

Nick's hacker cred isn't attained through the usual intellectualizations and philosophizing that marked Mr. Mann's far better "Heat", "The Insider" and "Collateral".  The detached Nick is all muscle, less thought.  He's an anti-Mann type, and the director seems uncomfortable handling this breed of his celluloid white guy.  Nick's more interested in breaking bodies than cracking codes. 

"Blackhat" is bogged down in Nick's sudden, intense brutality.  Mr. Mann abruptly abandons the technical and digital constructs he spends half of "Blackhat" cultivating.  Nick transforms into a standard action man.  "This isn't about zeroes and ones!," Nick declares late on to a nemesis.  "This is about money!"  Ass is about to be kicked.  Men, not numbers, will be crunched. 

The screenplay by Morgan Davis Foehl isn't coherent enough to ground its characters in a sense of purpose beyond Nick's own.  They exist to serve him rather than the stated purpose he's loosed from prison for.  The problem is, because Nick is so uninteresting and Mr. Hemsworth never climbs out of first gear, the film's energy lags and alienates.  Nick looks as if he'd rather be elsewhere -- happier in prison. 

"Blackhat" never pulls you in because it doesn't know where it is going.  It is a work still searching for itself.  And the film doesn't find a way to make the world it tries to portray interesting.  Characters lack shape.  When the story bogs down they become expedient, eliminated solely to lionize a bland Nick to emerge as the hero he doesn't deserve to be.  It's all addition by subtraction but the addled math of this mess doesn't add up.  With his awkward American accent mixed with native Aussie tongue Mr. Hemsworth is all Abercrombie Mann with no soul. 

Like other Mann characters (Vincent of "Collateral" and Neil McCauley of "Heat" wore matching silver gray suits and white shirts) there's a doppelganger-type relation in "Blackhat."  Mr. Hemsworth's Nick has a similar look to Val Kilmer's Chris Shiherlis in "Heat" -- a blonde, hulking and volatile being of few but choice words.  Mr. Kilmer's Chris had emotion but Mr. Hemsworth's Nick is an all ice-hulk who never melts.  He's robotic, saddled with the thankless task of addressing a boring riddle the intellectuals in the room don't stay alive long enough to solve. 

The film and its women, including Ms Davis's cynical jokester Carol Barrett (read: Burnett), seem taken by Nick for no apparent reason.  "You can call me chicka anytime," Carol flirtatiously tells Nick.  It's a weird moment because the lovefest comes from nowhere.  Ms. Davis is too intelligent for "Blackhat," and its only source of entertainment.  The script forces her character to dumb down.  All of the characters on Carol's team warm to career criminal hacker Nick with little reason to.  In short, Nick is the sole eye-candy of "Blackhat", a mythological showpiece of nothingness who somehow knows the answer to every problem. 

Nick's likely never been to a country in the Far East but automatically knows what the designs of the bad guys who target it are.  "This place has no culture," he dryly intones to Lien.  It's an ignorant, ethnocentrist statement casually dismissing an ancient land he's been in for two minutes.  Nick is also a cultural hacker in this respect.  He hacks into a worldview, remaking it a narrow corner of his insular world, and makes money in the process.  It's all a neo-colonization.  Nick gets the Far Eastern woman while the cast gets iced.  The cyberthriller trail runs cold.

Mr. Mann's lone scene of cool is when Nick merges tools of metal (screwdrivers) and attaches them to himself.  It's the merging of man and industry as inseparable identies that is the only true thing Mr. Mann succeeds in doing, but even it is a scene about indulgent physical showcase than character.

Nick's romance with Lien is a huge problem.  They look at each other twice and they are in bed.  There isn't even a "Snow Falling On Cedars" romance.  It's barely "Miss Saigon."  More problematic: Lien is the compliant, stereotypical Asian wallflower woman.  At one point she asks Dawai, "shall I go with you or with him?"  Lien is a service rendered for Nick's reward, and he is rewarded with little more effort than a glance at Lien's neck. 

"Blackhat", which runs hot and cold like a temperamental faucet, has inexplicably distracting scenes that belong on the cutting room floor.  The film is distracted by episodes of gunfire, roof-top building assessment and subway train excursions borrowed from better Michael Mann films.

Is "Blackhat" about technology, mendacity, machines, money or all the above?  I don't think it knows.  The film erases its own identity at every turn and on a whim.  When one train of thought grows cold, "Blackhat" switcheroos to something else.  The film looks like a fortune cookie that looks good on the outside but with a blank message.  The film lacks a true one.  In "Blackhat" there are keystrokes.  Keys.  Fingers.  Enter buttons.  Exit ramps.  The elements of industry are all here but the director forgets to turn on the lights to the superhighways on which they all travel. 

Also with: Andy On, John Ortiz, Archie Kao, Peter Rowley, Jason Butler Harner, Manny Montoya, Shi Liang, Spencer Garrett, William Mapother.

"Blackhat" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for violence and language.  Its running time is two hours and nine minutes.
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