MANN AND HEMSWORTH CONFER ON SET: A RICH SENSE OF THE VISUAL

Mann's gorgeous new cyber-crime thriller is not for haters

Though it has a relatively enormous budget and its obsession with cyber crime is something new, Michael Mann's Blackhat reminded me of Wong Kar Wai. It has an Asian setting. It is visually gorgeous, and it is saturated with style in every frame. Watch it for the visuals. In those terms, it is glorious, and has no equals at the moment whatsoever. Showing with it is another thriller, Taken3. This series celebrating the aging but durable Irish machismo of Liam Neeson plainly has its fans. It opened and blasted the new Hobbit out of the box office. But Taken3 looks like nothing much. The images are so shabby they seem to be seen through a dirty lens. Blackhat had a bigger budget, and it shows. Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is interesting for its moral and political ambiguity and admirable for its economy of scene, but visually, it's plain and conventional.

Blackhat's story is preposterous; that is, it's close to actual events. To begin with a hacker causes a near-meltdown at the Chai Wan Nuclear Power Plant in China, then creates an artificial run on soybean futures on the international market. A young, good-looking Chinese woman, Chen Lien (Lust, Caution's Tang Wei) is brought in, and she calls for her brother Chen Dawai (Taiwan-American heartthrob Wang Leehom), who insists that his MIT roommate Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth of Thor and Rush, dashing hunk turned hardnosed brainiac) now a criminal hacker, be released from federal prison to consult. Even in prison he is a dangerous maverick at the computer: he's just managed to use a cell phone to deposit an extra $900 in each of his cellmates' commissary meal credit accounts. Chen Dawai perceives that it's a code his brilliant roommate wrote in college that was used to author this cyber terrorism.

When asked to help catch the cyber terrorist who's just struck in China and the US, the smart but impressively beefy Hathaway demands a commuted sentence and not just a furlough: in the event, he's allowed to roam free with his team around the world with an ankle monitor. Bring in Viola Davis from the US Department of Justice arranging a US-China collaboration, and you have the team. They will later hack the uncooperative NSA to get hold of special software that can reconstruct a lost file. And by this time Nick and Chen Dawai's sister Lien will have fallen madly in lust with each other. Mann's film is as romantic as it is violent as it is complicated with intricate and far-fetched computer hacking lore.

But what matters, as with Wong Kar Wai all along, are the visuals. If you don't savor throwaway shots of a Shanghai fast food restaurant or LA Korean joint or a big musical dance ceremony in Indonesia for the sheer dreaminess of the imagery, forget it. You should switch auditoriums at the cinemplex and watch Liam Neeson beat up some bad guys in Taken3.

Just as Krzysztof Kieslowski spun out an elaborate series of visuals to demonstrate how a phone message travels from one country to another, Mann creates image metaphors to show complex computer codes sailing far into the Internet as "the camera passes through a computer terminal to the network of wires, motherboards and pulsing white packets of sinister code" (Peter Debruge, Variety). The visual's the thing. This may seem like pointless swooping in and out of phone lines and routing boxes and microchips and computer terminals just to make some electronic on-of on-off seem sexy, but this is just perhaps the most abstract element of visual poetry in a film that is all about such poetry.

Tha haters are out in full force to get this picture. They say it makes no sense. Neither does Antonioni's L'Avventura, or Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild. This is, of course, constructed out of genre elements those don't touch. But the poetry and the mystery are there if you sit back and enjoy them. And there are some spectacular explosions too, and some very neat shootouts. The $70 million was well spent. The film not only looks good, but has a wealth of teeming location shots and plenty of helicopters, exploding cars, weaponry, and fragmenting vehicles.

In Blachhat, as in other Michael Mann films, the line between good and bad is blurred, as is obvious from the get-go with the enlisting of a major cyber criminal to beat a cyber terrorist. Again, it's the visuals that make the difference. All the good guy and good girl team members are beautiful, but the "blackhat" cyber criminals they're out to catch are uglies. Not as ugly, though, as the haters who have brought down the Metacritic rating of this lovely picture to a 49.

For a charming eulogy and a knowing corrective, read Manohla Dargis's admiring New York Times review. A eulogy of a Michael Mann film was in fact one of Dargis's first published pieces after she became one of the Times' three top film critics. Dargis remains loyal to Mann through thick and thin. That other time it was Collateral, in 2004. Admittedly, Collateral had a narrative clarity that Blackhat lacks. Both share a stunning use of digital nighttime imagery.

Even Blackhat's visuals seem not to appeal to some viewers. Hence Debruge's remark that "it looks just plain awful at times, owing to Mann’s proclivity for down-and-dirty digital lensing," and his claim that the action sequences are "well-choreographed but otherwise YouTube-quality." It may sometimes require a bit of sophistication to appreciate blur in cinematography, but to see that it's not an error in this movie, one has only to notice that in Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography there are parts of all the images that are crystal-clear.

Dargis points to allusions to the objectification of contemporary reality in the movie through the books Hathaway is shown having in his prison cell -- Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida -- but they're throwaways: Blackhat may be sophisticated in its references, but it's not solemn or self-important about them.

Debruge is justified, though, is in seeing a disconnect between Mann's demand for up-to-date realism and the plethora of far-fetched plot twists in Morgan Davis Foehl's screenplay. It's fanciful, though it fits Hemsworth, that the protagonist should be both a computer programming whiz adept with weaponry and hand-to-hand combat. See all this as a bad miscalculation on Mann's part, or see it as a tribute to his artistry that he can take such an arguably sketchy and dubious script with internal contradictions and make such an entertaining and stylish movie out of it all.

There's a Hitchcockian finale, a tense climactic sequence of a huge and colorful parade in Jakarta’s Papua Square, and the final, violent showdown between the villain (Yorick van Wageningen), his henchmen, and Hathaway, weaving in an out of a big costumed crowd and sometimes jostling and terrifying them. By then you may be exhausted by the quick changes of venue and the explosive chases and fights. Or, as I hope, you may be blissfully sated by the rich sense of color and light and the generous exoticism of the vernacular Asian locations in Hong Kong, Jacarta, and Malasia.

Do not discount this movie or think of it as a January dumped item. This month also sees the US release of Inherent Vice, American Sniper, Still Alice, and Timbuktu, among others.

Blackhat, 133 mins., opened in the US Friday 16 January 2015. UK 20 February, France 18 March.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.