Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: none of it makes a lick of sense. We don't know what the heck these people are doing or talking about because hacking is over most of our heads. A lesser screenplay and a less experienced director wouldn't know how to connect the audience with all the technical mumbo-jumbo. So Mann draws us in through actions and ever escalating ramifications, both on a global and personal scale. It begins when some kind of virus, shown sweeping through a Chinese computer system, causes a nuclear power plant to meltdown. America was hit by a similar attack but managed to catch it in time, so China's top security analyst Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom) teams up with FBI agent Carole Barrett (Viola Davis) to track down the "blackhat" responsible. To do it, Chen gets his buff hacker pal Hathaway spring from prison to help out. There's also Chen's hot hacker sis Lien (Tang Wei) who we know will hook up with Hathaway because....well, somebody has to. He's a hacker who looks like Thor! Somebody's definitely going to hook up with him and it won't be Viola Davis.
Tracking down the global terrorist takes the team to some of the slummiest hotels all around the world where they set up shop and start mashing keys. But this is Michael Mann and the whole thing is more of a visual exercise than one would expect it to be, and the immediacy he brings to each scene is palpable. Using a grittier digital look than we saw in Public Enemies, Mann works in some intense firefights on the city streets of Malaysia, Jakarta, and Hong Kong. He knows better than to waste a physical force like Hemsworth, putting his character in the thick of every battle and foot chase, and of course the occasional steamy sex scene. It's not a great performance by Hemsworth; he tends to mumble his lines and comes off more enigmatic than charismatic, but he gets to kick ass and crack high-level security codes, sometimes within moments of each other. That's a pretty sweet gig. Davis doesn't get to do as much as she probably should, while Tang Wei and Wang Leehom (both appeared in Lust, Caution) has an appeal that hopefully will cross over to U.S. shores.
The techno-babble Mann piles on is informative yet dull, but he makes up for it with an abundance of beautifully-staged action. Pretty soon Blackhat stops resembling a cyber-thriller and that's perfectly okay. Not everything about Blackhat is designed for us to understand, but like most of Mann's best work it hits you on a gut level.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
