Film review: Blackhat, Michael Mann (2015)

There's an artist in the UK called Jim'll Paint It who uses Microsoft Paint to create affectionately absurd and frequently nightmarish renderings of scenes suggested by his fans, like "Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach":

Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach - ealadubhsidhe pic.twitter.com/wCuwLOzDII

— Jim'll Paint It (@Jimllpaintit) September 13, 2016

I mention this not only because it's utterly brilliant but also because, with a little help from this retrospective on Miami Vice by Stephen Hyden, I've realised that it provides a good way of illustrating how best to enjoy Blackhat, the 2015 hacker thriller from director Michael Mann.

Hyden says of Miami Vice that "the plot [...] matters less than how it looks and feels", and although I think Miami Vice is still a pretty terrible film, I also think Hyden's observation works perfectly for Blackhat.

Blackhat is about a hacker who gets let loose from jail so that he can help the US and Chinese governments track down a nastier hacker who caused a nuclear power station to go into meltdown. The good(ish) hacker is played by Chris Hemsworth, the same actor who plays Thor in those superhero films. Yes, really.

And despite his character's primary skills being by nature best deployed at a distance and distinctly non-physical, Hemsworth is soon gallivanting off to China and Malaysia, throwing tables at people and using screwdrivers for things other than upgrading his motherboard.

There's also a love interest, who's supposed to be a network engineer. This mostly involves caressing Hemsworth's forearms.

But none of this matters. What matters is that, as in two of Mann's masterpieces, Heat and Collateral, Mann has a reason for pointing his lens at things and making them beautiful. In this case those things include the interior of a Korean restaurant, the skeleton of a half-built skyscraper, bullet-riddled shipping containers and the control room of a decaying nuclear reactor.

Mann shoots cities, and people interacting with cities, better than anybody else around. Way better.

And so it doesn't matter how improbable it is that Thor-as-freed-from-prison-kickass-hacker would be sent into a still-hot reactor core to physically wrench out a hard drive while the walls crumble around him. What matters is that it gives Mann an excuse to shoot Hemsworth in a lime-green radiation suit smashing the place up with an axe (see one minute forty for a brief flash):

Just like Jim'll Paint It cramming Zippy, Kermit and Sooty into a reimagining of the Alien chestbuster scene, Blackhat takes a mountain of improbables and uses them as the anything-goes basis for creating something almost unbearably gorgeous. It's a work of art.