Blackhat opens in China, where a hacker has infiltrated the computer system of a nuclear power plant. He destroys the pumps that manage the cooling system, causing the plant to overheat and explode. But it’s unclear why he does this. No demands are made, no political motivations offered. A short time later, the same code is used to infiltrate and manipulate a futures market in America. Whoever is on the other end of the keyboard makes off with about $76 million in winnings.
American authorities, led by Carol Barnett (Viola Davis), are stumped until Chinese computer cop Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) tells them that he recognizes the code. Indeed, he helped write it. And if they’re going to discover who is using the malware for such nefarious purposes, they’re going to need his former MIT roommate and lead coder, Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), who is currently serving hard time in federal prison for a series of hacking misadventures.
Hathaway and his team travel the globe, from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta, in an effort to discover who has the power to cripple nuclear power plants and manipulate the price of soy—and why he seems so fascinated by a desolate strip of land in Malaysia.
Blackhat is very much a Michael Mann film. It’s about an alpha male moving through the world and bending it to his will, his excellence inspiring lust in women. But it’s also a movie about systems, about the interconnected, international nature of modern crime.
It’s a theme Mann tackled previously in Miami Vice (2006). In that film, a pair of undercover Miami cops, investigating a mid-level Colombian drug dealer, stumble onto a larger syndicate distributing drugs, guns, you name it across the globe.
Blackhat takes this to another level. All of our systems, all of our networks are interconnected. And they’re all vulnerable to attack, filled with exploitable weaknesses that skilled operators can manipulate for their own nefarious ends.
In this conception of the international order, Mann is less concerned with national rivalries—the United States versus China, say—than he is with the constant struggle between order and chaos. Tensions between nation-states are little more than intra-departmental squabbles from procedurals past.
The lesson, as always in a Michael Mann film, is that if we want to get the job done, we need to stay out of the way of our betters. Betters like Hathaway, the improbably muscled hacker with a heart of gold.
The fact that most of the crime takes place behind a keyboard doesn’t mean we can’t have a shootout or three, and Mann choreographs them with his trademark skill. That being said, Mann’s preference for digital film—a grainy, documentary look he has cultivated since 2004’s Collateral—is not well served by some of Blackhat’s more frenetic sequences.
The image blurs and smears, an effect that adds to the ethereal nature of the nighttime faceoff at an Indonesian parade that takes place during the film’s closing moments, but distracts earlier on, when characters are running in daylight and Mann’s handheld camera jarringly pitches up and down.
Blackhat may be lesser Mann—it’s not as tight as Collateral, not as epic as Heat—but it’s still an entertaining procedural from the master of the genre.