Synopsis
Nicholas Hathaway, 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. As Hathaway closes in, the stakes become personal as he discovers that the attack on a Chinese nuclear power plant was just the beginning.
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Cast
- Chris HemsworthNicholas Hathaway
- Tang WeiChen Lien
- Leehom WangChen Dawai
- Viola DavisCarol Barrett
- Holt McCallanyMark Jessup
- Andy OnAlex Trang
- Yorick van WageningenSadak
- John OrtizHenry Pollack
- Ritchie CosterElias Kassar
- Christian BorleJeff Robichaud
Recommendations
- 88
Slant Magazine
Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence. - 83
The Playlist
Blackhat is a meticulous and exacting procedural, as obsessive with its hunt for its intangible antagonist as Mann’s compulsive desire to appreciate the flow of 1s and 0s in the virtual space. It’s chockablock with technobabble and jargon that may alienate the average viewer, but Mann’s secret weapon is his infectious fascination with the subject. The movie is like a conductive surface for his unmitigated zeal, and its potency is viral. - 80
Time Out
Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
At its best, the movie achieves a broody dazzle, even as the narrative proves less memorable than one would have hoped. But the fluency of Mann’s direction and the slow-burn chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Tang Wei counterbalance the more ordinary, and not always involving, procedural elements. - 60
Village Voice
There’s visual thinking everywhere you look in Blackhat, which is great until you realize that it’s bled into a kind of overthinking — the movie is too much of a good thing, an exercise that flattens any potential exhilaration or excitement into the sensation of grading a term paper. - 50
Variety
The film is a snarl of contradictions, starting with the discrepancy between Mann’s obsessive demand for realism and the consistently implausible screenplay. - 42
Entertainment Weekly
Occasionally, Mann shows flashes of the sort of springloaded action set pieces he was once hailed for, like a shoot-out during a religious parade. But mostly they just come off as warmed-over parodies from a onetime master aping his own style. - 40
The Guardian
Blackhat can’t decide if it is a grim, realistic story from the trenches or cyberwarfare or a giddy, “who cares if that makes sense?” Bond film.
