Two stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang
Rarely has a film worked so hard,
on so many levels, to be dumb, dull and mean-spirited.
I cannot imagine why an A-list
director such as Michael Mann attached himself to Morgan Davis Foehl’s
thoroughly ludicrous, bonehead-stupid script. Nobody with an ounce of savvy
could have seen gold in this dross; if green-lighting this sort of puerile junk
truly represents corporate thinking, then Universal Pictures is run by monkeys.
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| On the run and trying to evade pursuit in Hong Kong's colorful market district, our heroes — from left, Nick (Chris Hemsworth), Lien (Wei Tang) and Jessup (Holt McCallany) — quietly make their way to the safety of a modest apartment. But can they be truly safe, in a world where everybody's movements are tracked by cameras and computers? |
Foehl has worked as an assistant
editor, mostly on television, for roughly a decade. Blackhat is his first script.
It shows.
He makes every rookie mistake,
and quite grandiosely: from a relentless barrage of computer-oriented
techno-babble, to seriously — seriously
— misjudging the impact of his malicious tightening of the dramatic screws.
Tuesday evening’s preview audience grew downright hostile as we hit the third
act, and with good reason; we weren’t merely betrayed, we were sucker-punched.
Not that Mann doesn’t deserve his
share of the blame. Under better circumstances, a thriller dealing with
cyber-terrorism should be able to ride the obvious promotional bump delivered
by headlines still echoing from the recent Sony hack. Indeed, the serendipity
is almost spooky, on par with 1979’s The
China Syndrome being released 12 days before the nuclear accident at Three
Mile Island.
But we know Blackhat is destined to be a stinker, when Mann opens his film with
a protracted, electron’s-point-of-view sfx ride that purportedly shows what
it’s like, deep within a server’s countless circuit boards, when a rogue
command activates. The whole sequence feels like a what-the-hell cast-off from Tron, and it brings this new film to a
grinding halt ... before it even starts.
And, to compound the felony, Mann
soon indulges in this tedious exercise a second
time.
A bloated thriller that clocks in
at a butt-numbing 133 minutes can’t afford that sort of self-indulgence; it denotes
a director who isn’t in control of his own movie. Which, in Mann’s case here,
quickly becomes obvious.
