- Location: AMC Loews Lakewood Town Center 12
- I've never thought of Michael Mann as an abstract filmmaker, but his new movie Blackhat has me reconsidering that opinion. With both this film and 2006's Miami Vice, Mann has finally distilled the police procedural to its barest essentials. The protagonists are hero archetypes, including finely stubbled white American men who can't button a shirt, utterly competent African-American women, and reliable Asians. The villains are anonymous foreign guys with beards. There is a plot about stealing or hacking something, some impressive shootouts, and maybe even an exploding car, but the bottom line is that everybody is just doing their jobs. The nighttime cityscapes and their associated soundtracks are mesmerizing.
- In this particular instance, the crack team of heroes consists of imprisoned hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), Chinese detective Dawai (Leehom Wang), tech expert Lien (Wei Tang), FBI agent Barrett (Viola Davis), and an air marshal (Holt McCallany). Hathaway and Dawai used to be college roommates so that it will matter later in the story when Dawai is attacked in an ambush. Hathaway and Lien quickly become lovers so that their seperation looms as a tragic possibility. If the villains of the piece (Yorick van Wageningen and Richie Coster) have well-explained motivations, it's news to me. Various dramatic events occur simply because the genre demands it. From a lesser filmmaker, I would call this a paint-by-numbers approach. Mann reminds me more of Monet. He painted hundreds of versions of Water Lilies, but who's complaining?
- While Blackhat is rarely as engrossing as most of Mann's earlier work, it does successfully reinforce his reputation as the modern master of urban scenery. Simply put, the director knows how to capture the mood of a city, whether via aloof helicopter shots of the Hong Kong skyline or by wading firsthand through a crowded religious ceremony in Jakarta. I'm probably not the only person who had been waiting for Mann's neon-illuminated artistic sensibilities to take a long-overdue tour through Asia. He's also still an expert at meticulously constructed shootouts, the best of which slithers through a curving underground tunnel before emerging into a labyrinth of shipping containers. If you ask me next week to describe the plot of Blackhat, I probably couldn't provide you with many specifics. If you asked me how the film felt, however, I'd tell you it felt exactly like a Michael Mann production.
