Blackhat

Before you read my review of Blackhat you should know that Michael Mann is by far my favorite director in all of Hollywood. He can make a city's skyline, the ghettos of Hong Kong, and even a melted nuclear power plant look like the most beautiful thing on Earth simply by the way he films it. Clearly his director of photography plays a big role in this too but he hand picks the guys he knows will produce his vision on screen and as a result you get visually stunning theater that's mixed perfectly with a sonically, airy, yet rocking score.

The only thing that could keep me from watching a Mann film is if he filmed himself sitting on a toilet for two hours. While he's never quite done that, he did come close when he filmed Johnny Depp taking a two hour crap on his career when they made Public Enemies together, and because of that massive failure, he's fallen off the map a bit and is now treated like a director whose barely above McG status.

This has to be reason why Blackhat was so universally panned by critics. I will say that early on it's full of cheesy one liners that are supposed to be badass but in reality fall well short of that. And there are some exchanges between a few of the main actors that are difficult to understand because of their thick Chinese accents or Chris Hemworth's ridiculous mumbling, which of course causes major issues as Mann's films are dependent upon snappy dialogue that leaves you floored and quoting it for decades. See Robert Deniro staring Al Pacino down in the movie Heat as he says "Let's say you do got me boxed in and I have to take you down. We've met face to face, yeah but I will not hesitate, not for one second." That was easily one of the best scenes in cinematic history.

But once you get past the first 20 minutes or so of all the technical hacking speak and the action actually starts up, you see Mann began to shine. Hemsworth is a coding and hacking genius whose serving a 15 year jail sentence because of his computer crimes. Well one day a nuclear power plant in China has a meltdown because an online hacker tapped into their system and caused a few of it's pumps to fail. A few days later, a different hacker who appears to use the same or similar code taps into Wall Street's system, causes the price of soy to skyrocket and profits $74 million from it. Both the US and Chinese government are concerned about what their next target will be so they grant Hemsworth a pardon if he's able to help them track down the hackers and bring an end to their terror.

Their journey takes them from the US, to China, and eventually Jakarta, and as you go along the ride with them,  Mann is able to give you a lasting shot or two of each location; in particular Hemsworth's escape via a private plane over a Chinese bay with his beautiful girlfriend. There isn't a shoot out scene that's as good as the one in Heat (possibly the best there ever will be) but he does have one or two in the streets of Hong Kong and in the tunnels of an underground hideout that will have you begging for more!

The final fight scene between Hemsworth and the head bad guy, who my idiot friend said looked like the evil biker from Raising Arizona, was a memorable one and the perfect ending to this intelligent thriller. I rate this movie as very FRESH as it's been a while since I've had this much fun in a theater.