A stylish and gripping cyber thriller. 4/5 stars
Michael Mann's cyber thriller Blackhat met with a lukewarm response from critics and audiences when it received its cinema release, partly because of the director's surprising choice of leading man. Get over the shock of seeing Thor star Chris Hemsworth as a keyboard-clicking computer hacker rather than a hammer-heaving Marvel hero, however, and Mann's stylish movie will soon have you gripped and intrigued.
Hemsworth's convicted hacker, Nick Hathaway, becomes a player in the film's labyrinthine plot after being temporarily sprung from prison to join a joint Chinese-US task force that is striving to catch the computer terrorist who has sabotaged a nuclear reactor in Hong Kong and triggered a run on the New York Stock Exchange. What mayhem will this foe trigger next? Headed by Chinese agent Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), Nick's former college roommate at MIT, his network engineer sister Lien (Tang Wei) and hard-nosed FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), the team jets from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Malaysia to Jakarta in pursuit of the elusive and very deadly crook.
Along the way, there are devious cat-and-mouse games conducted on computer screens, interspersed with blistering shootouts of the kind Mann patented in Heat and Collateral. Other Mann trademarks make their presence felt, such as the reverence for nuts-and-bolts professionalism and the slick and enthralling depiction of the modern world, from glittering cityscapes to the microscopic but no less imposing vistas visible through fibre-optic cables and on the surface of silicon chips. And the streak of melancholy romanticism running through the film - another Mann hallmark - is quietly compelling, too.
