Michael Mann’s “Blackhat” begins with the camera slowly descending from above Earth, diving down into a nuclear facility, and submerging into the underlying, twisting maze of electronic circuitry. A single, glowing blip — a bit of malicious code, we soon learn — invades and proliferates.
The malware’s fanning spread through the network recalls the stealthy swoop of the black-clad gangsters of Mann’s last movie, the John Dillinger thriller “Public Enemies,” as they sinuously flowed across the marble floor of a Midwestern bank. In “Blackhat,” Mann has returned to modern day for an especially timely tale of cyberterrorism, but his grim fascination with the poetry and choreography of violence is the same, even if it comes by pixels rather than pistols.
“Blackhat” (in which there’s plenty of gunplay, too) viscerally dramatizes digital life, or at least a muscular techno-thriller version of it. For moviegoers who have wanted to ESC out of previous cyber-thrillers like “The Net,” Mann’s lethally steely film hums with urgency.
When the poisonous code prompts the meltdown of a Hong Kong reactor (and a simultaneous strike on the commodities market), desperate investigators spring the hacker Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) from prison to aid the pursuit. (“Blackhat” is a term for a criminal hacker, whereas a “whitehat” does it beneficially for security.) Hathaway quickly takes command of an unlikely U.S.-China joint task force led by Hathaway’s former MIT roommate Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) for China. Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) and Henry Pollack (John Ortiz) are on the U.S. side.
By the time the film leads to a gorgeous nighttime showdown in Jakarta’s Papua Square, much of its geopolitical relevance has slipped away in clumsily scripted action-film cliche. But, man, is it something to look at.
