Critic Reviews

Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.

Slick and sometimes goofy as it is, Blackhat is an odd, fascinating movie: a high-tech action thriller about the human condition. I can think of no better current illustration of the notion that, to quote this site's founder, it's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it.

Blackhat is a meticulous and exacting procedural, as obsessive with its hunt for its intangible antagonist as Mann’s compulsive desire to appreciate the flow of 1s and 0s in the virtual space. It’s chockablock with technobabble and jargon that may alienate the average viewer, but Mann’s secret weapon is his infectious fascination with the subject. The movie is like a conductive surface for his unmitigated zeal, and its potency is viral.

Mann’s first feature in nearly six years, the hacking thriller Blackhat is rough even by the standards of its director’s current creative period.

The film is a snarl of contradictions, starting with the discrepancy between Mann’s obsessive demand for realism and the consistently implausible screenplay.

Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results.

Michael Mann’s thriller Blackhat, a story about the intersection of bodies and machines, is a spectacular work of unhinged moviemaking. By turns brutal and sentimental, lovely and lurid, as serious as the grave and blissfully preposterous, it combines a truckload of plot with many of the obsessions, tropes, sights and sounds that distinguish his other movies.

It’s no "Heat" but the niggles are easily forgiven given the virtuosity on show and the mood oozing from every frame. No one shoots faces, architecture and gunfights like Mann.

Blackhat is about the contraflow; it's a disruption in the new technocracy and a fly in the ointment of big budget Hollywood cinema.

Only Michael Mann could have made it. And thank goodness he did.