Blackhat

Michael Mann – 2015 – USA

With his new film, Michael Mann joins several others of his generation now in their early 70s, (such as Walter Hill, George Miller, Martin Scorsese, etc.), who are making noticeably youthful films; not youth-oriented but youthful in their aggressive insistence on making films that are cinematic and refuse to fall in line with prevailing trends in blockbusters and Oscar-bait.  For me, this makes them more valuable than the films of journeymen who play by the rules and the films of up-and-comers who aspire to play by the rules.  Mann is one of a handful of directors still around whom I consider masters and exemplars of the most admirable kind of film career.  His ambition is not to collect awards but to practice what he considers a strict purity of cinematic expression.  Among other things, that means that most of the junk you’ll find on critics’ and film geeks’ checklists of what makes a film good are jettisoned to make way for extended set pieces that allow Mann to make scenes and situations that please him.  And because they please him, they should also please anyone with a cinematic mind.  While the cops-and-robbers scenario that Mann prefers in most of his best films remains intact, he does add a challenge to the mix in the form of the extremely un-cinematic world of cyber-terrorism.  When an unknown attacker causes a power-plant meltdown in China, an imprisoned American hacker is cut loose to help find the culprit; the reward, of course, being his freedom.  Sure, it’s one of the oldest plots in the book, but as with the films of most great directors, who tend to return repeatedly to the same genre, the plot is the least important aspect of the film.  I was extremely disappointed by the casting of boring, flavor-of-the-month beefcake prettyboy Chris Hemsworth in the lead when there are so many far more interesting actors who would’ve been great.  Given the film’s critical and box-office failure, surely a better actor wouldn’t have done the film any harm since the presence of Hemsworth did nothing to save it.  I suppose you could argue that Mann deliberately wanted someone as bland as possible to play the part since there is almost zero character development at all; we know nothing about him when the film begins and not much more when it ends.  Ultimately, Hemsworth hurts the film just as much as he helps it, which is not at all.  Mann himself is the star, and the film is not about cyber-terrorism, it’s about Mann’s camerawork and editing and his docu-drama- style direction that is aloof and yet biting whether in moments of quiet reflection or amid machine gun shoot-outs.  The things that middlebrow critics and casual audiences regard as weaknesses in this and other Mann films are things that I don’t see as shortcomings at all.  His style is challenging, and in a better world we’d welcome that fact instead of treating it with contempt and skepticism.  But let’s not complain; let’s just enjoy the fact that Mann is still making films his own way and take comfort in the fact that future generations will admire his work while that of his contemporaries is mostly forgotten.