Blackhat (2015)

Director: Michael Mann
Writer:    Morgan Davis Foehl
Cast:       Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Wei Tang

A furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners hunts a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. Michael Mann said he was inspired to make Blackhat after reading about the events surrounding Stuxnet, which was a computer worm that targeted and ruined almost one-fifth's of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. It was designed to attack industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

Chronologically speaking, the last film I have seen of Michael Mann is 'Collateral'. So, despite the bad reviews that Blackhat got, I was not quite prepared to see such a fall in quality from a great director like Mann. I count 'The Insider' as one of my most favorite films of all time and 'Thief', 'Heat' and 'Collateral' were all great. Both Manhunter and Last of the Mohicans were also very good as well and so what I am saying is that I hadn't seen a bad film from Mann before this one. He is most famous for making films that are very realistic in the filming of its set-piece sequences and I guess this one is not different when it comes to the depiction of cyber-crimes. But unlike other protagonists in Mann film, we don't feel one iota of 'Giving a fuck' about the lead character played by Chris Hemsworth. To make matters worse he tries to bring some emotional drama sequences into the whole proceeding and those scenes never failed to bring about some smiles and that is never a good sign. Whatever realism Mann is trying to bring in the central subject matter sits in stark contrast to the laughably bad drama part of it. To top it all you get several action sequences with guns, RPGs and fireworks and the length of just more than two hours is excruciatingly long. I can't really say that he is hamstrung by talent-less actors because the script is so shit that it is not fair to judge them on basis of their work in this film. 

Overall it is a terrible watch and should be avoided even if you are a big fan of Michael Mann. I don't know whether 'Public Enemies' was as shit as this one but it did get better reviews. You cannot really trust those reviews I guess because some of the reviewers might have deluded themselves because of their admiration for the director. Well, Blackhat, just about confirmed that he can really be shitty at times.

Rating: 1.5/5