I don’t know about you, but when I think “elite computer hacker” I think “six-foot-four blond Australian with a shaved chest and chiseled features,” so Michael Mann’s new film Blackhat is right up my alley. I just hope he meets a big-titted government scientist played by Brooklyn Decker and they team up against some shady ethnic types.
I love Michael Mann (though his last film, 2009’s Public Enemies wasn’t really my cup o’ tea) and Blackhat, co-written by Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl, hits theaters January 16th. How much should we make of it hitting right in the middle of post-awards turd dump season? I haven’t heard anything about the release being pushed back, so maybe Legendary Pictures finally figured out that releasing a decent movie when it will have zero competition might be a winning strategy, not that I’ve been screaming about it for a decade.
Set within the world of global cybercrime, Blackhat follows a furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners as they hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. Along with Hemsworth and Davis, the film co-stars Tang Wei, Holt McCallany and Wang Leehom [and the wonderful John Ortiz] and is set to hit theaters on January 16.
The trailer makes it look like Mann’s trying real hard to make coding and file transfers look cinematic, but still left lots of explosions and punch socky in case it didn’t work out. Can’t argue with that strategy. I also enjoy that the film stars Tang Wei and Wang Leehom but that the big time computer hacker is still a dude so big and white he’d make Himmler cream his Hugo Boss. Haha, nice one, Hollywood.