From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action sequences in exotic locations, while the basic theme is at least urgently topical. It's just that there's little evidence that the project fired Mann's imagination, or inspired him to breathe plausible life into his characters.
The set-up is as widescreen as you could wish. A nuclear plant in China is sabotaged by an unknown hacker (Mann makes sure we get the point by swooping his camera into the innards of cabling and microcircuitry), and the resulting explosion and radioactive leakage is presented in raw pseudo-TV news style. The Chinese immediately set up a super-nerd strike force to hunt down the hacker, led by Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang, pictured below) who also ropes in his brainy sister, Lien (Wei Tang).
Creating a Sino-American joint effort seems to have been part of the movie's purpose, presumably for international marketing reasons, and Chen insists that he must recruit his old American buddy Nick Hathaway (Chris "Thor" Hemsworth), a cyber-genius who he knows from his college days in the USA. Indeed, the pair of them wrote the RAT (or Remote Access Tool) used by the nuclear hacker. The snag is, Hathaway is currently in jail for his own hacking expoits, but a bit of inter-governmental wheeling and dealing soon gets him sprung, even though Hathaway must wear a GPS tracker and be accompanied by his own federal marshal.
It's lucky they got him out, because otherwise there'd have been no movie, yet also unlucky, because Hemsworth plays Hathaway with all the wit and panache of a particularly soporific stretch of the M40. The hulking blond actor is more like a football quarterback or a tennis pro than a pasty-faced digital geek who stays up all night hunched over a computer keyboard, and also has inexplicably well-developed skills in unarmed combat and the use of firearms to go with his encyclopedic knowledge of global stockmarkets.
Of course, all this makes him an invaluable asset in the hunt for the hacker-saboteur, and incidentally irresistible to the svelte Lien. Our intrepid squad take off on an international race against time, since it appears that the hacker's exploits were only a trial run for the imminent Real Thing which will be many orders of magnitude worse. Mann's problem is that, like other directors before him, he can't find a way to make cybercrime look very interesting on screen. Watching people clattering away furiously at keyboards is just going to remind many viewers of the day job they're trying to forget, while felony by internet is by its very nature nebulous.
Nonetheless, there are some thunderous scenes set against dramatic Hong Kong backdrops, where our heroes team up with the local police in a pitched battle against the Lebanese terrorist who's in cahoots with Mr Superhack (there's even some vintage Mann-esque electronic music on the soundtrack), and the denouement unravels in Jakarta in the midst of a riotously colourful religious festival (pictured above). The hacker himself, despite having hatched a cunning masterplan involving gargantuan stockmarket manipulation, turns out to be a seedy overweight schlub who looks like he lives in an all-night porn cinema. Which probably makes him slightly more plausible than Nick Hathaway.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Blackhat
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