Film Review: Blackhat

I caught Blackhat over the weekend, because the title promised to be a film about hackers. And because the producers cleverly used a hacking term as the title, I badly wanted to like this film. Instead, I left the theater with mixed feelings.

It turned out not so much to be a film about hackers, but an action film involving hackers.

The Premise

A power plant in China is hacked into and destroyed. Agent Chen Dawai (played with a mixture of sternness and elegance by Wang Leehom) is sent to investigate, and deduces that the code that opened the backdoor for the hackers was written by him and his then-roommate, Nick Hathaway (an incredibly buff Chris Hemsworth), who is currently doing time for some cybercrime. He pulls some strings to get Hathaway out of jail to help in the investigation.

Warning: Possible spoilers ahead!

And thus you have been warned. Let's get on with the review, shall we?

The Characters

Wang Leehom is stoic and serious as Chen Dawai. Came across as intelligent and a stand-up guy. But somehow very stiff. He looked uncomfortable being in the movie.

Chris Hemsworth as Nick Hathaway, the bad-ass genius hacker, is just a little too unbelievably awesome. Fine, I can buy him being one hell of a programmer. I can buy him being impossibly gorgeous and oozing machismo, with a body that could only be described as "godlike". (Oh wait...)  Slick fighting skills? Could have picked those up in prison. Knowing how to use a gun? Still plausible. But using it with enough skill to single-handedly dispatch all the bad guys who had gunned down his entire team? Er....

Tang Wei played Chen Lien, Chen Dawai's sister. I felt it was a waste of screen time. Undeniably eye candy, but her role didn't extend beyond giving Hemsworth's character someone to sleep with and carrying out certain plot points which could just as easily have been executed by Wang Leehom's character. And seriously, for crying out loud, if you're going to turn her into a sex object anyway, why's she fully clothed in every sex scene? Where is the smoking hot body that made her so famous in Lust, Caution?

Adrian Pang and Andy On had short-lived cameos here. The presence of Andy On, in particular, raised an eyebrow from me. Didn't I last see him in True Legend and Special ID as the main villain?

The Mood

It alternated between The Matrix and The Bourne Identity. Slick and sophisticated with the techie scenes, grim and gritty with the fight scenes. Not that I'm complaining, really. But at one point, I'd had enough with the whole fetish the filmmakers seemed to have with zooming up close whenever a hack was made, past the screen and into the inner circuitry. Were those guys aiming to show the entire 7 layers of the OSI Model or something?

What I liked

The dialogue had some gems. Nick Hathaway's method of negotiation speaks to me. Here are some examples:

Agent: This isn't a negotiation.
Hathaway: Well, I just made it one!

Mook: You want to speak with the boss? This is not possible.
Hathaway: I'm holding all of his money. Make it possible.

I also liked the way the characters were uneasy allies at first, suspicious of each other, and eventually grew on each other. Enough for Hathaway to feel bad when the woman constantly busting his balls early in the film, gets gunned down later.

And the locations! Oh, the locations! The languages! Going from China, to USA, then to Hong Kong and finally Malaysia. Mandarin, English, Cantonese and Malay. This felt like such a cultural experience.

Hathaway also pulls off some nifty identity theft in the movie. Nicely done.

What I didn't

The bad guys had bullets that could pierce through steel and kill Andy On's character, and Hathaway somehow thinks wearing some magazines and newspapers as body armor will help? What the hell?

Conclusion

Nice idea. Had its flaws. Could've been done better. And sure as hell didn't require the presence of Tang Wei's character. Kept me entertained, but not a show I'd watch again.

My Rating

5.5 / 10

Ah well, what the hack.
T___T