Blackhat
Tags: suspenseful, neo noir, murder

Plot synopsis:
At a nuclear plant in Chai Wan, Hong Kong, a hacker causes the coolant pumps to overheat and explode. Not long after in Chicago, the Mercantile Trade Exchange gets hacked, causing soy futures to rise. The Chinese government and the FBI determine that the hack was caused by a Remote Access Tool (RAT). A military officer in China's cyber warfare unit, Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang), is tasked to find the people responsible for the attacks, and enlists the aid of his sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei), a hacking engineer. He meets with FBI Agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) in Los Angeles and reveals the code in the RAT was written by himself and Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), his college roommate, in their school days, years before Hathaway was sent to prison for an unrelated hack. Dawai asks that the FBI arrange for Hathaway to be released from prison, where he is serving a sentence for computer crimes. Hathaway is offered temporary release in exchange for his services.
A dead colleague's computer yields a clue to a connection, so Hathaway and Lien go to the rendezvous but it is a trap set by the hacker to alert him to pursuit. Hathaway fights three men. They both head back to their hotel room. Things heat up and they kiss passionately and have sex.
In Hong Kong, the team works with Hong Kong inspector Alex Trang (Andy On) and traces the stock trade money to a known paramilitary operative named Elias Kassar. A stakeout team is murdered while Hathaway, Jessup, Chen, Trang along with a Special Duties Unit team raid Kassar's hideout but once again it is a trap. A shootout ensues and Trang as well as a number of SDU officers are killed. Kassar and his men escape.
The nuclear plant has stabilized enough to retrieve a data drive from the control room but it is corrupted. Agent Barrett turns a blind eye while Hathaway hacks into the NSA to use a fossiled data tool called Black Widow to reconstruct the corrupted data. He learns that the hacker's server is based in Jakarta. Lien finds out the hacker has been buying high-resolution satellite photos of a site near Seri Manjung, Malaysia.
Hathaway's hack into the NSA does not go unnoticed and the US government demands his return to prison. Dawai's superiors agree as they do not want to antagonize the US, while Barrett and her partner Agent Jessup receive orders to detain Hathaway. Dawai, Lien and Hathaway manage to elude their pursuers and make plans to leave Hong Kong and continue their investigation when they are attacked by Kassar and his men, who have been following them. Dawai is killed; shortly after, Barrett and Jessup, who have been tracking Hathaway using an ankle bracelet, arrive at the scene. While both Barrett and Jessup are killed in a firefight, they buy enough time for Lien and Hathaway to escape into the subway.
Hathaway and Lien travel to the location of the satellite photos in Malaysia to try and figure out the hacker's goal. Hathaway realizes that the hacker's attack at the nuclear plant was merely a test for a later plan to destroy several major tin mines in Malaysia, allowing the hacker to make a fortune trading tin futures, financed using the funds from the Mercantile Exchange hack. The two then travel to Jakarta and using a distraction manage to physically gain access to the hacker's server. They manage to transfer the hacker's money from his Hong Kong bank and force the hacker to contact them. The hacker (Yorick van Wageningen) and Hathaway agree to meet to negotiate the return of the money, supposedly in exchange for Hathaway's involvement in the larger scheme.
Hathaway insists the red hat and Kassar come alone but they bring their gang along. The meeting place is a crowded parade and Hathaway trails the hacker and Kassar from behind. Kassar pulls a gun on Hathaway but Hathaway is prepared and manages to stab him with a hidden screwdriver. Two of the hacker's men catch up and wound Hathaway, who manages to kill them. Hathaway finally faces off with the hacker and manages to kill him despite getting stabbed. He escapes the chaos of the parade with Lien's help, and then gets broke up. The film ends with Lien and Hathaway leaving Indonesia, with the hacker's money still in their bank account.

Review: Well as a security analyst, I can tell you to believe that scenario happens millions of times every year But, because we didn't have excessive flashing lights and cartoonish villains with a master plan to take over the entire world, the movie gets panned.
The reason for the low rating I think is that the audiences today got too used to dumb 'action packed' crap like Taken that consists of little more than clichés and boring camera work.
This movie dares to be different, it dares to be slow paced, watching it is like reading a book, it actually requires a mental effort on the part of the viewer to keep track of what's going on and naturally people these days don't like that.
If you want to get an idea of what this movie is like without spoilers - think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Don't be discouraged by the low rating, it's just that slow-burn thrillers are not everyone's cup of tea these days.
The beginning of this movie tried to dazzle us with computer hacking showing us what happens inside a computer with the CGI going wild, but it went on for too long and we started thinking of other things we needed to do like reorganizing our sock drawer.
Working off a screenplay from Morgan Davis Foehl, Mann seems to focus more on having the shakiest hand-held cinematography not in a Paranormal Activity film than actually telling a coherent story with good characters.
And for those of you who were expecting Michael Mann to deliver a film like Heat or The Insider, you will walk away from this thoroughly disappointed.
which, sadly, is even less entertaining than watching YouTube videos on how to write HTML.His best mate from university also just so happens to have a semi-hot sister with dodgy English tagging along, and while it's understandable that, having been banged up for some time, our hacker is very likely to jump on the first thing in a skirt, her interest in him seems like a bizarre Chinese experiment on how to have a relationship in which there is zero chemistry.There's some US Marshall assigned to keep the hacker in line, but that doesn't include stopping him from going around cutting open people's faces with broken bottles in restaurants, or interfering with crime scenes when their main suspect has been removed from the equation under suspicious circumstances.Our hacker is also 10x smarter than the entire Hong Kong police force, a krav magra expert, quite nifty with a firearm and the all-round hero, being the first to go into a reactor after some kind of meltdown.
Given his skillset, he could have just hacked into MI6, gotten a fancy watch and car full of gadgets and lived out the rest of his days as 007.Seriously, the film is god-awful and for a huge fan of action films like myself to want to press the stop button in the middle of the first real fire-fight, something has to be very wrong.As it happens, I couldn't endure much longer after that and came here to write this instead, because telling others how I turned this tedious dross off seemed like a much better way to spend my time than sitting through the rest of the film to see what happens in the end...
Probably the only thing I really liked where the two big shootout scenes, you saw a bit of Heat's director Mann there:)Unsynced audio and weird changes in volume where also very annoying, something you don't expect from a $70mil movie.I'm giving this a +1 because it tried to be authentic so a 4 bumps up to a 5/10 rating..
Chris Hemsworth as lead is willing, he makes the best out of his character, even if it seems he's lost most of the time.The story revolves around a cyber terrorist attack on Hong Kong nuclear plant.
While it probably isn't fair to believe that every film from Michael Mann to be as engaging as Heat or as exciting as Collateral, audiences should still be able to expect a certain level of competence from the veteran director.
If it weren't for a handful of signature shots, I would never have believed that Mann had anything to with this mess of a film.Chris Hemsworth, best known for his role as Thor in the Marvel films, is laughably miscast as Nicholas Hathaway, an MIT graduate currently serving a 15-year sentence for hacking into a series of banks.
It's an arrogant, ham-fisted attempt to create excitement where none exists, and the truth is, we don't care about seeing the data travel from Point A to Point B - we just want to know what happens when it gets there.Rarely have I found myself so overwhelmingly frustrated with a film, and I honestly can't remember the last time I sat in a theater checking my watch as often as I did during Blackhat.
The trailer looked alright, looked like it would've been quite an entertaining movie, with a nice story woven into it as well.But not one of the expectations came true.The actors do 'okay' acting out the poorly written script.
I saw this when it came out and my immediate impression was of a 90s techno thriller, of something a little outmoded, with its whiff of millennial angst and nefarious mastermind wreaking havoc on the economy; early on hacking even has to be made tangible for us as a threatening energy surging through a fabric of wires, a silly image.Flaws come by a certain contrast between a world they tried to ground in believable dynamics and then a stock action hero – on top of having to be a hacker – walks through it.
Being in IT myself, I was commenting to my partner about how most of the points in the film where technology was highlighted were actually pretty realistic: none of the "Uploading Virus" screens and unlikely beeps and squeaks that pass as IT in most movies.To be honest, based on my long career in technology, you don't often see IT people who look like Chris Hemsworth, nor have his fighting skills.
Enough things went wrong for Hemsworth's character to set the stage for viewers to not expect a constant set of easy or implausible victories, like in most predictable modern films.If you enjoy realistic, tense action, then give this one a go..
I walked out of the theater about three-fourths of the way through.I know that Michael Mann has made other movies that have been deemed good (I personally haven't seen Heat and others), but his direction in this movie is just awful.
I feel like Chris Hemsworth is the only one who is really trying and his American accent is actually believable.I don't often complain about sound design in a movie, but I have to make a special case for Blackhat.
Code is not drag-and-drop, code does not look like it does in the film, and your I.P. address is not the same thing as a URL.The characters were incredibly dull and absolute zero chemistry together, which just made their interactions that much more "why?" Finally, I could write an entire novel on the weird inconsistencies in the plot and things in the movie that just make absolutely no sense.The only reason, and I mean THE ONLY REASON, I am giving this movie two stars is that there is a fight sequence featuring Chris Hemsworth near the beginning that is actually pretty bad ass..
If you appreciate Michael Mann's movies like "The Heat", you surely have to watch this one too.
All in all, the movie gives you the impression that what happens there is credible, it could be similar in the real world and this also creates a tension in the film because you cannot anticipate a lot of things like in the majority of movies following the standard stereotypes.
If the studio / director / screenwriter picked one of the Blackhat story lines and went for it completely, this movie may have been great.The star, Chris Hemsworth is gorgeous and easy on the eyes...
It's nice to start the cinematic year in Michael Mann's world with echoes of Thief, Manhunter, Heat,...It's a man's world, and that's what I enjoy in these films and the way they look.
It rarely pulls me to the cinema lately - last year I went to see Fury, Interstellar, Gone Girl, Transcendence, Im Keller, Inferno, Pot v raj.I believe hackers might actually feel good about this film, it's the tech-geeks that just won't be able to enjoy what's it really all about at the core, but they just love to critique stuff via the internet.So I came here to write something for the first time :-)I just hope Mann will be able to make more movies, and perhaps a bit more often than was the case in the last decade....
So unless these "critics" were half asleep while watching the movie or texting on their phones trying to write a half-baked review during the movie they obviously missed the point that Michael Mann was trying to deliver.The idea that any of this could happen at any time is a real reality that we live in, cybercrime is a real threat and it's a subject that no one ever capitalizes on.
The characters don't spend a whole A lot of time trying to explain every little detail of how they're going to beat the bad guys, and I think this is why this movie works it kind of leaves you not really knowing what exactly is going to happen throughout the entire scene.
You're not going to see somebody fire 1000 rounds out of a handgun, hit every bad guy, and never change magazine.I feel the final scene in the movie is truly stressful, making it a true Michael Mann ending (gruesome, unpleasant, and straight to the point)and is tied up with a nice bow on top!I give this movie a nine out of 10 stars because I feel as if it's the underdog in the movie business, the truth we all don't want to face, and the reality of our society!.
In this case, I'd say Michael Mann's done quite a good job with this subject matter.I'm an avid Mann-fan since the 80's, and though his style has changed here, including maybe a bit too many shaky-camera scenes to amplify a, for most people, quite boring act of hacking, he still manages to stand out in his visuals and story-telling.
This movie kind of depicts it as the new actual "arms-race" it really is, and that in information lies the real power.About his grainy, very special kind of camera work, that some people don't really get, his a pioneer in using the Red-systems, or redOne digital camera systems which allow a fantastic possibility to film in locations with very limited lighting, night scenes and the possibility to get a very far focus on backgrounds at the same time as focus on for example a character in the absolute foreground.
This is, however, not appreciated by some, preferring the old way of making "analogue" filming, and I think both ways deserve a place in the future.It's high paced, information-packed, but I see it as an excuse too see it again and again.This is a fast-paced movie about a highly interesting and shady world, so if the subject appeals to you, and you liked Mann's earlier work, I think you are in for a treat!/Leon.
Acting was really bad, Wei Tang looked so stiff and unnatural(Chris Hemsworth, on the contrary, is a great actor, even in this movie).
And well done saving money again, on using crappy Arri Cameras, watching it on the big screen it just looks cheap.So thanks Mister Mann, for wasting a whole evening of mine on a way too long, too boring, too cheap movie.
This really is an underrated movie.Just finished watching it and had a really good time.A real Michael Mann-feature, not his best, but still good enough!
The movie is also pretty scary in terms of hacking possibilities.Blackhat is very reminiscent of Mann's other film The Insider.
Wow, I'm in shock.I didn't know anything about this film before watching it, I just about made it alive to the end and I see the director's name - Michael Mann!Michael Mann!One of the most interesting visual stylists and sound innovators, great story teller and action director ...
Awful, ridiculous script, terrible acting, dreadful characters, dumb dumb dumb.While I was watching it I had thought the director was heavily influenced by, and 'ripping off' Michael Mann's style - the night-time yellow lighting, lots of hand-held, the quick brutal violence and gun sounds.
Summary points that out, so I'll leave Chris Hemsworth alone ;) Very rarely do hacking movies, even still to this day now that it is more mainstream, ever get notoriety but since this one had a bit higher caliber actors and Michael Mann at the helm I figured I would give it a look (because as you see, I won't just watch anything lol).
But I actually didn't question any of that once it got going, despite my want for him to be annoying he's a really likable actor and although at first I thought the accent was gonna be a bit dodgy, once again I went with it (on second thought this could be because he doesn't really say a lot and has a good line in looking moody).I liked the plot.
The movie tries to be intelligent, or at least look like it is with a very suspenseful dramatic filmmaking style from Michael Mann which actually reminded me more of the films Steven Soderbergh has been doing lately like Side Effects and Haywire.
He's helping out the police to catch some black hat hacker and he participates in some random fights, calls himself a "ghostman", travels around the world even though he's convicted and should be in jail...Technically speaking, full of illogical things like social engineering some big shot in the NSA and breaking into NSA's secret program, IP addresses with numbers above 255 etc.The camera is shaking for no apparent reasons, the sound gets really loud in one scene and in the next scene you can't hear anything.Seriously, save yourself some time and skip this movie.
It's 2 hours plus of a convoluted and uninteresting catch a killer scenario that never once gets out of first gear and eventually ends on such a whimper that this is surely a production that marks a sad career low for usually imaginative and reliable Michael Mann who has made a longstanding career out of white knuckle thrillers and created his own unique brand of visuals.Blackhat features none of what makes standout Mann films like The Insider, Heat or Collateral such blasts of fresh air and it seems as though Mann struggled to find his creative mojo in amongst a story that is in dire need of a more interesting narrative anchor or a single character that we can care about and in the end not even Mann's usual behind the camera winnings get a play through.
It's possible that Mann struggled with the complexities of making computer hacking exciting but that is no real excuse considering there have been similar films that deal with this new age terror threat in a much better way.Not helping this weak and uninvolving story is that fact that Blackhat showcases a previously unseen weak side to Australian ex-pat Chris Hemsworth who in charisma filled turns as Thor or great dramas like Rush has shown much promise, but here struggles with both accent and a character we never believe.
Unintended laughs will be had when watching Hemsworth battle it out over internet code and when his Nick takes matters into his own excessively violent hands the film almost becomes unwatchable in its awkwardness.As a fan of Mann's work and good thrillers in general I was willing to give Blackhat a fair shot, even after it has been derided overseas, but upon inspection I found a soulless film that fails in almost every single department.
After first being sited when it activates a nuclear meltdown in China, Chinese Computer Security Agent Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and his sister Chen Lien (Wei Tang) ask for Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), a convicted hacker and friend of Chen Dawai to help them figure out who's behind the cyber-hacking.
This is a slow-paced movie which has a few lenghty moments but overall, once you get into it, it turns out to be quite an achievement on several fronts.Most of the Michael Mann stuff that we liked in his previous films are present, although more sparse, including two intense, ultra-real shooting scenes.
As a techie myself I was looking forward to this Mann movie with Chris Hemsworth whom I always enjoy in his Thor role.
Actually I was too bored to figure it out.If Chris Hemsworth spent even a fraction of his time training as an actor for this film as he had done on buffing himself up, we'd have had a better movie here.
It doesn't really work as a Michael Mann film and it fails completely as a computer hacking movie..
'BLACKHAT': Three and a Half Stars (Out of Five)A cyber-thriller directed by Michael Mann and starring Chris Hemsworth; as an expert hacker who's released from prison early, in order to help the US and Chinese governments stop a malicious hacker terrorist group.
It's definitely an action film that's worth the time to watch; if you like Michael Mann, you shouldn't be disappointed.Watch our movie review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUT8JIkuU9Y.
(If the negative reviewers here thought they were getting a superhero movie like 'The Avengers', then they weren't paying attention to the previews :-) .) Blackhat features a computer hacker (Chris Hemsworth) who is furloughed from prison to counter-attack an elite cybercrime team.
(If the negative reviewers here thought they were getting a superhero movie like 'The Avengers', then they weren't paying attention to the previews :-) .) Blackhat features a computer hacker (Chris Hemsworth) who is furloughed from prison to counter-attack an elite cybercrime team.