Blackhat

Blackhat

** / ****

 

Reviewed By Sean Trolinder

 

Directed by Michael Mann

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Wei Tang, Leehom Wang, Ritchie Coster, John Ortiz, Holt McCallany, Andy On, Christian Borle

 

 

 

            Once upon a time, Michael Mann directed movies with strong female characters. There is no doubt that the subject matter in Mann’s films has always been very masculine, but hear me out. In The Last of the Mohicans, Madeleine Stowe’s portrayal as Cora matched the intensity given by Daniel Day-Lewis’ Hawkeye, mainly because she had moments of emotional stability, even when it seems like Hawkeye was about to lose it. In Heat, Ashley Judd’s Charlene betrays the cops by tipping her husband, Chris, about their plans, even after the police threatened to take away custody of her son. Even Marion Cotillard’s Billie Frechette doesn’t seem threatened by the cops in Public Enemies. I’d even go as far as to say that Gong Li was far tougher than most of the men in Miami Vice. In Mann’s latest film, Blackhat, he fails to portray Chen Li (played by Wei Tang) as a strong counterpart to Hathaway (played by Chris Hemsworth), since her essential function throughout the film is to just be his lover. When introduced in the film, Li is hailed as a very loyal person that does not crack under pressure and is an expert computer engineer. Her backstory certainly sounds promising, yet does Mann really allow us to see Li stay level under pressure and exhibit her intelligence as an expert in computers? Very rarely, if at all.

            The extreme stereotyping of women is not the only distraction in Blackhat. Its second major flaw are the number of plot holes that litter the script. At the beginning of the film, Mann gives the audience a bunch of close tracking shots of information moving through a cyber-channel, until whatever’s being sent arrives at a Chinese nuclear reactor. Predictably, it blows up, causing major concerns for the Chinese government. To track down the hacker that sent the encryption that causes a water pump to blow up the reactor, the Chinese government hires an intelligence officer named Chen Dawai (played by Leehom Wang). He agrees to do this assignment, under the condition that his sister, Chen Li—who again is supposed to be an expert computer engineer—accompanies him, since he believes that she is the only person he can truly trust with valuable information. Meanwhile in the United States, catastrophe strikes on Wall Streets, as a hacker raises the number on soy materials, which causes several people to cash out to a nice profit. At first, the U.S. government doesn’t know what to make of the issue, but they just assume that it is connected to the reactor explosion in China. Though it seems highly unlikely the two incidents are related, the screenwriters automatically play into the assumption that the audience wouldn’t question the impossibility, so they run with it (and, yes, the two are related in the film). To find this mysterious hacker, the United States agrees to work with the Chinese, so Dawai and Li arrive.

            Once in America, Dawai starts calling the shots, demanding the United States release a hacker named Hathaway from prison. Predictably, the U.S. intelligence officers of this mission—Carol Burrett (played by Viola Davis) and Henry Pollack (played by John Ortiz)—do not like being ordered to release a prisoner, but we soon find out Hathaway’s true worth. Before being sent to prison, Hathaway wrote an elaborate code that the same hacker used. As the architect behind the very thing that has caused this chaos, Hathaway is the only person alive intelligent enough to sort through the code to trace where the hacker might be and what his/her next line of attack might be. Hathaway is granted a temporary release, but he does not enjoy the idea of going back to prison for doing something of great worth to save the world. The U.S. intelligence officers agree to allow him limited access to computers as he does this job (yet this is a ridiculous plot hole, since he needs a ton of access just to track the coordinates of the hacker).

            Soon after, Dawai gets preoccupied doing God knows what, leaving Hathaway alone with Li. At this point in the film, it is as if the screenwriters had a difficult time justifying how to get Hathaway and Li alone, leading to their predictable fling. While working, Hathaway finds little clues along the way that lead the team closer to the hacker, in between moments of sleeping with Li. When Dawai finds out about their affair, he tends to just shrug it off as if it’s no big deal, saying, “This is the happiest she’s been in years.” His only real concern is if Hathaway can stay out of trouble and to avoid prison time if he is to take this relationship seriously, in which Hathaway intends to (but again, predictably, he later gets involved in a situation in which the U.S. wants him thrown back in jail for hacking into a program called “Black Widow,” making him a fugitive again for a better part of the film).

            True to his form, Mann’s auteur style—which consists of grainy film, handheld cameras, and relentless violence—is on full display. Even though Mann’s films today are not quite of the caliber that they were in the nineties, any enthusiasts of cinema can respect how he remains true to his form. In many scenes, which involve explosions, gun shots, and knife fights, Mann makes the moments seem real, as if watching a documentary, since the handheld camera gets the audience up close to the action. The grainy film quality fits the mood of its theme, which seems grimy and full of sleazy character. On top of that, the movie is about an underworld of hackers, so contrasting distorted photography in an age of advanced technology seems to fortify why characters like Hathaway and Dawai are never sure about whether just one hacker is behind the two catastrophic events.

            I have to admit that it is painful to watch Mann regress into mediocrity. In the nineties, back when my curiosity for film was fresh, Mann’s work was a staple for how I measured excellence. The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, and The Insider are all excellent films, each deserving of making top fifty lists of nineties films. However, Blackhat is just another film that leaves fans of his work wondering if he’ll ever recapture the magic he had in the nineties.