Blackhat (2015)

Suffers from inconsistencies, both technical and story wise. They change the shooting styles, cameras, fps, warmth/cold - for no apparent reasons at all. Feels like it's not clear what this movie "wants to be". The main character is supposed to be a "super-hacker" but doesn't do anything "super hack-y", just wanders around, shooting people, and nails the female protagonist. Doesn't have many hacking-scenes for a "hackers movie", has tons of boring gun-scenes instead, from some reason. The motivation of the villain was, not interesting. References many other "movie-cliches" (not in a good way). Severely lacks humor. The few jokes in it are really cheesy (yeah, it's not a comedy , but comic reliefs are important). Many of the audience members left the theater in the middle or before the end.

Video review: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=842110769178326

Fmovies: If you like taut, slow-burn suspense thrillers like Alfred Hitchcock's films and 'The Drop' in 2014 with James Gandolfini (which I thought was excellent), then please *go see this movie* in the theater; I think you will like it. (If the negative reviewers here thought they were getting a superhero movie like 'The Avengers', then they weren't paying attention to the previews :-) .) Blackhat features a computer hacker (Chris Hemsworth) who is furloughed from prison to counter-attack an elite cybercrime team. The cybercrime technology in the movie includes current techniques such as RATs (Remote Access Trojans) and keypad trackers. Following the movie plot is important -- the script is sparse (my only real objection); so it's important to track the plot developments. Michael Mann's camera-work is impressive during chase scenes, and his animations of cybercrime technology processes are inventive. I plan to see it a second time in the theater with other friends.

After a Chinese Nuclear plant is hacked, FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) insists the FBI work with the Chinese government to track the hacker down. She is finally convinced that this needs the help of super hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) who is serving a 15-year prison sentence.

I think most movies have an obligation to get the audience engaged, especially in the beginning. The beginning of this movie tried to dazzle us with computer hacking showing us what happens inside a computer with the CGI going wild, but it went on for too long and we started thinking of other things we needed to do like reorganizing our sock drawer. This was the first step in losing the audience.

The rest of movie slowly comes around trying to locate the hacker with huge amounts of Geek Teckno-babble losing us once again. Then with Nick's help we come to realize that this hack was not political, but something else. Yes, this is the "Twist" we come to believe is in every movie. And it is here the movie begins to make sense as more hacks come about disrupting economies throughout the world. Ah, so it's all about the money. Ah, we thought so. Once that is realized, the movie settles down to something we can finally understand: good guys vs the bad guys.

However, it is still slow-going as players stand around waiting for their lines. Add to this too many sub-titles that were too long to read before the scene changed and we lost the last 6-words or so. What were they thinking? Don't they know I never took that speed-reading course? Hey, I meant to.

A U.S. Marshall was supposed to stick with Nick everywhere he went, but we see him go to a restaurant to meet one of the hackers and no Marshall is in sight. Did the Continuity Girl (yeah, it's usually a girl) not read the script and mess up? Of course, there is a big fight here and, of course, Nick prevails, of course. Actually, this was a very good (read brutal) fight scene. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Probably the best part of the movie. Hey, who needs THOR?

This is tedious, but watchable because we keep hoping this will get better and it does in the last 15-minutes. The love interest between Nick and Chen (Tang Wei) is forced, but so were a lot of things in here. So what else is new? Most scenes were so short no player had any time to show off any acting talent. Long shots of player grimaces don't count. Now, about that sock drawerÂ…Â…Â…Â…. (4/10)

Violence: Yes. Sex: No, we only see a make-out session. Nudity: No. Language: yes, some not much.

Blackhat fmovies. This is one of the few, say past fifteen years, films with science and or high tech as an important plot element, whether sci-fi or just drama, that did its research and got the science/tech mostly right. And, it did so in a way that explained it with some entertaining clarity e.g. the opening, and a couple of other scenes, showing packets of data traveling through computer architecture was about as good as it can be. The rest of the film that dealt with cyber hacking was presented with accuracy and surprising clarity for a mass marketing film. Great location authenticity with filming in L.A. (OK, that's not so great), Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong.

On the other hand the action scenes were basically just movie entertainment and at times a bit overboard. Such as, and a bit far-fetched, that our lead character (Hemsworth) is a world class coder (programmer) and some how had the time to become a world class action killing machine. Talk about being a Renaissance man! More of an international cast would have been interesting. Davis (with Tina Turner wig which made no sense for an agent) was stereotyped into filling the black FBI agent role which seems to be a popular character placement in film in recent years (e.g., recently, "Powers").

Blackhat is the latest from maverick director Michael Mann...it also happens to be his worst film ever. Yes, I am even factoring in The Keep. It is THAT bad. Starring Chris Hemsworth and Viola Davis, this film is a misfire and criminally misuses a talented cast and a talented crew. Nick is a furloughed convict trying to nail a destructive hacker who is damaging the financial stabilities of countries all around the world. Now, on the list of people better suited for this role, Chris Hemsworth shouldn't even be on this list. Watching him as a hacker is as painful as watching Adam Sandler in drag seduce Al Pacino. Working off a screenplay from Morgan Davis Foehl, Mann seems to focus more on having the shakiest hand-held cinematography not in a Paranormal Activity film than actually telling a coherent story with good characters. And for those of you who were expecting Michael Mann to deliver a film like Heat or The Insider, you will walk away from this thoroughly disappointed. The action is short, rare and very tame while the scenes that are attempting to explain what the hell is going on are so convoluted, long and boring that it creates a very uneven film that borders unwatchable. One of the biggest gripes I have with this film is the cinematography. It is entirely too shaky for a film like this and, on a serious note, reminded me more of End of Watch. While that style fit End of Watch perfectly, it doesn't fit this film. It doesn't make it look gritty, it just makes it look painfully under-produced and underfunded. Overall, Mann's Blackhat serves as one of the biggest disappointments in recent memory considering the fact this is Michael Mann we're talking about here...the guy who did Heat, Thief and Collateral. Unfortunately, if this is the best Mann has to offer, I fear it is only going to get worse as time goes on. Blackhat is underdeveloped, unrealistic, and filmed terribly. Watcher beware!!!

I think that about sums this film up.

Some hacker who most will recognise as the god of thunder is released from prison by his bestie, to help track down some faceless cyber-criminal. An hour and a half in, we're still none the wiser as to what's going on, but do know that the released hacker is free to run around the globe as he pretty much spearheads the investigation... which, sadly, is even less entertaining than watching YouTube videos on how to write HTML.

His best mate from university also just so happens to have a semi-hot sister with dodgy English tagging along, and while it's understandable that, having been banged up for some time, our hacker is very likely to jump on the first thing in a skirt, her interest in him seems like a bizarre Chinese experiment on how to have a relationship in which there is zero chemistry.

There's some US Marshall assigned to keep the hacker in line, but that doesn't include stopping him from going around cutting open people's faces with broken bottles in restaurants, or interfering with crime scenes when their main suspect has been removed from the equation under suspicious circumstances.

Our hacker is also 10x smarter than the entire Hong Kong police force, a krav magra expert, quite nifty with a firearm and the all-round hero, being the first to go into a reactor after some kind of meltdown. Given his skillset, he could have just hacked into MI6, gotten a fancy watch and car full of gadgets and lived out the rest of his days as 007.

Seriously, the film is god-awful and for a huge fan of action films like myself to want to press the stop button in the middle of the first real fire-fight, something has to be very wrong.

As it happens, I couldn't endure much longer after that and came here to write this instead, because telling others how I turned this tedious dross off seemed like a much better way to spend my time than sitting through the rest of the film to see what happens in the end... which is something I really couldn't care about.