Blackhat hack-neyed

A movie about cyber terrorism couldn’t be any timelier, what with the recent hacks of Sony Pictures and even the Twitter account of US CentCom. We live in a scary world and there are people who can use computers and networks to fulfil their evil designs.

That being said, Blackhat does not do anybody justice. It has an excellent, enticing premise that could have been an edge of your seat thriller in the good old Michael Mann style. Director Mann, however, somehow squandered everything, turning it all into what could easily have been an episodic crime-based soap opera on HBO, but with far more talking.

The plot is this: unknown hackers have caused a Chinese nuclear reactor to melt down, which makes the American stock market go crazy for soy futures. The Chinese investigators make a deal with their American counterparts: there’s only one person who can solve the mystery, and he’s in prison.

Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) gets released so that he can track down, or should I say ‘hack’ down the perpetrators before they strike again. Together with FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) and Chinese agents Chen Dawai (Lehom Wang) and Lien Chen (Wei Tang), they travel the world as they follow lead after lead toward the person at the source of the trouble and try to stop him from realizing his grand and dastardly plan.

Problems abound with this production, and it’s impossible to not start with Hemsworth. For one thing, he needs an acting coach, someone who can help him to be less like Pinocchio (i.e. wooden) and also pronounce words so that it doesn’t sound like he has a wet sock wrapped around his tongue. There were subtitles during the times people were speaking Chinese. There should also have been subtitles when he was talking too. Did this film even hire a sound technician?

Secondly, Hathaway was locked up in prison. Are we to believe that he’s been able to keep up with all of his expert hacking skills, let alone his typing so deft that his nimble fingers move like a master pianist but never mess up a single keystroke, not to mention how capable he is in martial combat against multiple attackers. Jail has somehow vastly improved this programmer’s fighting skills. He’s an electronic wizard and an expert combatant too. Cute.

Also, I have a major problem with his hair. What is an incarcerated rebel without a cause like him doing with boy band hair? Riddle me that one, Batman. Are hairstyles that important in the slammer?

But Hathaway/Hemsworth can’t bear the brunt of this abysmal, somnolent dreck. Mann has proven time and again that he can hold down a chatty crime thriller and keep audiences’ attention rapt. Heat is the best example of this. Blackhat is less than Heat and more like a hot mess. Computer programming and hacking are not really exciting enterprises (from what I’ve been told) and this is evident. Even in a world-travelling high-stakes drama like this, the constant reliance on scenes of computer work makes me feel like I’m watching people do accounting. There were snores in the seat next to me and I was jealous that my neighbour was being more productive with his entertainment time than I.

While we’re on the subject of computers in cinema, there should be a ruling that bans scenes where the camera zooms into the computer itself, through the wires and the chips so that we, the viewers, get a good look at the minuscule and minute parts right before the virus strikes, the ghosts literally in the machine. This does nothing for the audience unless there happens to be a computer engineer eating popcorn in the third row.

To call it languorous would be an overstatement. It’s much slower than that. It’s downright glacial in its pace. The movie clocks in at 133 minutes but feels twice as long. I might still be in the theatre now, fast asleep and dreaming that I’m writing this. Blackhat? More like NightCap!

This film is meant to be a kind of cat and mouse thriller but the stakes don’t seem that high. That nuclear plant barely registers as the instigating incident; it’s the stock market fiasco that sets the balls in motion. There are no threats to other military, financial or industrial installations, so we’re left to this story that might as well be about someone evading taxes. Hathaway might be a ‘hacker with a heart of gold’ to risk his life helping these people in their pursuit but honestly ... couldn’t screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl have included some kind of ticking bomb or race to a finish line?

Blackhat seems like it should have been a more international version of National Treasure but, in the end, it’s more like the stunted follow-up to Mann’s other yawner, Miami Vice. I liked parts of it, mostly involving Mann’s signature style. He sure likes his pretty lights and his gorgeous night scenes. That’s far from enough, though.

My advice: if you’re having trouble sleeping, curl up to this two-hour snooze tonic and enjoy the rest. If you still can’t sleep, put Heat on.