BLACKHAT (2015) * ½

Blackhat is your typical Michael Mann film.  Well, typical except it sucks.  It follows his usual fetishes for cops and robbers stuff.  There are lots of police procedural scenes, frantic phone calls, and cops staying frustratingly one step behind their man for most of the movie.  Instead of a bank robber or a drug dealer, the bad guy the cops are chasing is a computer hacker.  

As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”  Now, I’m not a tech guy.  I can barely blog.  Because of that, most of the computer gobbledygook went over my head.  It doesn’t matter if half the dialogue in the movie sounded like a foreign language to me, that doesn’t excuse the lethargic pacing and insurmountable running time.

Even with my computer illiterate handicap, I’m smart enough to know that the CGI shots of a virus running through a computer looked like the half-baked stepchild of Tron:  Legacy and an HBO promo from the ‘80s.

Hemsworth is good.  The sign of a quality actor is the ability to rise above the excruciating dialogue he’s been given and coast on charm alone.  He does that in spades.

Another big detractor for me was Mann’s continued use of digital video.  Although many of the exterior shots are slick and moody, the action scenes are often grainy and use a lot of irritating shaky-cam camerawork.   Seriously, it looks like Mann filmed half the action on his phone.  And I’m not talking an iPhone either.  Mann straight up Jitterbugged that shit.  

I’m not afraid to admit I was lost throughout most of this movie.  It’s one thing to be lost because you can’t understand what the characters are talking about.  It’s another thing when the camerawork is so bad you can’t tell what the hell is going on during the action.

What’s worse is that it takes an hour-and-forty-two minutes for Hemsworth to finally put on a black hat!  What the fuck?  By that point, I was rooting for Thor to pull out his hammer and smash his laptop to pieces.

AKA:  Hacker.