After rewatching Michael Mann’s big screen version of Miami Vice on Netflix – a film that I was underwhelmed by when I first saw it but now simply love rewatching (particularly Colin Farrell’s look and the Mogwai soundrops) – I realised that I was keen for more 2000s era Michael Mann (even with his use of Chris Cornell on the soundtrack to generate emotional depth). I’d never seen Blackhat (2015), which was a box office bomb that received mixed reviews on release. Thanks to Tom Lynch’s recommendation, I plunged in. The biggest hurdle to overcome is the fact that the buff, hunky Chris Hemsworth is cast as a genius hacker. Once you get over that piece of Hollywood wishful thinking, the film settles into a familiar investigation procedural, broadening out from Mann’s Chicago or LA territory into international areas like Hong Kong and Jakarta. Chinese military officer Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and his hacker sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei from Lust, Caution) offer a deal to imprisoned hacker Hathaway (Hemsworth) with the help of the FBI (Viola Davis) and the US Marshals (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter) to catch a ‘blackhat’ hacker causing global crises. With a mixture of hand-held docu-drama work and elegant widescreen compositions, all backed by the usual Mann tone of serious macho brooding, it all ticks along nicely, and finds a certain intensity after the second act, where similar to Manhunter, I was keyed up for the inevitable showdown between pursuer and pursued (in this case, the delightfully creepy and pompous Yorick van Wageningen as the villain). When the shoot-outs happen, they resound with the loud authenticity of the fire-fights in Heat. I am a sucker for Mann’s aesthetics and obsessions, and if you are a fan of his mixture of intense research and epic style, then Blackhat is better than you might expect, even if it is not up there with Thief or Heat.
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