Blackhat

Some very bad hombres are out to destroy Malaysian dams so as to flood the four largest tin mines in the world.  These bad hombres have invested in 74 million (stolen) dollars in tin futures and, of course, will make an immense profit from this criminal enterprise once the mines are kaput.  In the cinema, thirty years ago, the criminals, an ethnically mixed and interracial team of bad guys, would assault the dams with high explosives.  In Blackhat (2015), the bad guys, comprising a ethnically diverse, interracial team, plan to hack into certain computers controlling the flow-rates of water at the dams.  Notwithstanding this high-tech approach to crime, the sinister computer hacker is accompanied by a Maori body-builder, a gaunt Zombie of an Ethiopian/Somali mercenary, and everyone's all-purpose bad dude, an Albanian-Serbian skinhead with a permanent scowl.  The high-tech aspects of Blackhat seem more than a little extraneous to the plot, a chase across several countries that involves a series of fire-fights with machine guns and other high-powered weapons, culminating in a mano y mano fight with knives and screwdrivers.  The trappings of computer hacking really have nothing to do with the plot -- a story pitting a small cadre of good guys against the bad dudes involving a series of violent physical encounters. 

The good guys in Blackhat are Chris Hemsworth, horribly miscast as a rough-and-tough computer hacker who, nonetheless, reads Derrida and Foucault during the term of his imprisonment, the beautiful Chinese girlfriend, her loyal brother, and a very tough African-American lady secret agent.  (Hemsworth is the film's greatest defect: he scowls, mutters threats in a totally phony American accent and seems to be a complete moron.)   When a Chinese nuclear reactor is hacked by the bad guys, led by a furry Australian guy with a bearish figure wearing a Hawaiian shirt, an atomic catastrophe almost ensues.  The US NSA releases Hemsworth, the world's greatest computer hacker from his cell in a cartoonishly violent and hellish maximum security prison.  Hemsworth is deputized to lead the international team tasked with capturing the evil hackers.  This leads to a series of spectacular gun battles and, finally, a climactic confrontation in Indonesia in which the bad guys get their just comeuppance, although the hunky Hemsworth is badly wounded.  Michael Mann directed the film and it has received mixed reviews.  Mann made one certifiably great film, Thief  (1981) and his 1986 version of the Hannibal Lector story, Manhunter, is arguably better than Jonathan Demme's adaptation.  Many critics regard Heat (1995) as Mann's best picture, a view that I don't share -- indeed, I think Heat, featuring spectacular firefights on Wiltshire Avenue in LA signifies the beginning of Mann's collapse as a film maker.  Heat looks great but big chunks of the picture are idiotic and the famous gun battles that many critics have lauded are over-sized, over-produced, and fundamentally unrealistic, a characteristic shared by the battle scenes in Blackhat.  Sure Robert DeNiro  (in Heat) or Chris Hemsworth looks good shouldering a long gun or advancing into enemy fire with his machine gun blazing -- this is an argument for putting DeNiro (or Hemswoth) in a properly scaled Western or war movie, not an urban thriller.  The same problem afflicts Blackhat, although even on its own terms the film is pretty much gibberish -- if you are going to make a movie about computer hacking why incorporate so much garish combat in the picture?  The ending of Blackhat is unintentionally funny and racist to boot.  The Indonesians are in the throes of some kind of wild festival involving women dancers on the plinth of a huge monument and thousands of men wearing red bandanas moving in choreographed lines.  Into the midst of this gigantic dance, the bad guys and heroes engage in a big gun battle and, then, knife fight -- the Indonesians, all of them a full half-yard shorter than the protagonists don't seem to notice all of this violence.  Then, people start shooting their guns and automatic weapons, mowing down dozens of hapless Indonesians who find themselves in the cross-fire.  Why didn't these people react sooner by calling the cops or engaging in a little mutual aid to catch the wild-eyed foreigners armed to the teeth and running amuck in their midst.  But, apparently, that's just not the way that things are done in the exotic islands of Indonesia and, therefore, the big battle goes unobserved, although it is happening in plain sight, until the two sides start shooting everyone down.  (This is a movie involving unerring marksmanship -- the good guys can kill a bad dude at a range 150 yards with a stubnosed revolver.)  In the end of the movie, the surviving heroes go to the ATM and extract a couple hundred euros pocket money from their Swiss bank accounts -- can you really access top-secret Swiss bank accounts from a Jakarta airport ATM and, if so, will you really get a receipt showing that you have 47,654,801 Euros remaining in your checking account?