Blackhat is a Michael Mann film from 2015 and stars Chris Hemsworth.

The IMDB synopsis reads:

A furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta.

Michael Mann is a somewhat uneven director. Sometimes he makes absolutely brilliant films like 1995’s Heat, and sometimes he makes films like Blackhat. It’s not that Blackhat is a bad film as such, it’s just not a very interesting film. The actual plot and story are well written, and the story is actually kind of interesting, it’s just not really presented in an interesting way.

The first several minutes of the film are entirely dedicated to CGI scenes of data going through a computer and being sent through the internet to it’s target. It’s quite a long time before we actually get to see Chris Hemsworth and the movie gets going.

I’m not entirely sure why Michael Mann put these scenes in the movie, as it really slows things down right from the start. They’re not even really necessary as we see a villain typing something, then we see a nuclear reactor explode. The film could easily have simply cut from the villain typing into the computer, and then the resulting explosion, but I suppose someone was confused, and needed a visual explanation of what was happening. It’s a very strange start to the film.

I found the first half of the film to be very slow, so slow that I nearly gave up on it entirely, but there was just enough visual interest to keep me going until the half way mark, when the pace thankfully picked up and it actually started to become somewhat interesting.

Chris Hemsworth and the rest of the cast were fine, without being memorable. He was coming off the success of Thor and The Avengers and this was a chance for him to show audiences that he could do something different.

Visually, the film was reminiscent of Miami Vice, with it being shot on digital, however, it somehow felt a bit flat, and I said earlier, the pacing was off.

Overall Blackhat was slow to start, picked up about halfway through and then just ended. It was the sort of film that you would watch and completely forget about the next day, or when you have nothing to do one night and are looking for something more interesting than absolutely nothing. It would also be good to play in the background while you’re doing something else. however, as I said earlier, it’s not a bad film, it’s just not great film.

Michael Mann has only made one other film since Blackhat, which is the recently released Ferrari. Let’s hope it’s more interesting.