Review: Blackhat

City Paper grade: C+

In the opening moments of Blackhat, the camera zips along a bundle of cables, enters the seemingly vast confines of a computer, gradually shrinking to the microscopic and finally the digital level, where it finds a bit of malicious code bearing down on a Chinese nuclear plant with the terrible inevitability of a natural disaster. In turning information into something physical and tactile, director Michael Mann makes literal an instinct that led him to adopt digital video long before the format could be passed off as film. He continues to revel in the flaws inherent in the less respectable grades of video, adopting a frenetic YouTube aesthetic during action sequences that makes the shoot-outs and chases feel urgent and chaotically real. The joys of Blackhat are all in its surfaces, from the gauzy neon-lit streets of Hong Kong to the noisy silences between mumbled fragments of dialogue. That's been the case since as far back as Mann's Miami Vice days, but over time those surfaces have become increasingly diluted into a glitch impressionism. What's underneath is far less successful, with a miscast Chris Hemsworth as a chiseled hacker tracking cyber-terrorists and falling in rudimentary love with Lust, Caution star Wei Tang. The script, by Morgan Davis Foehl, regularly borders on the nonsensical; this time out Mann has built too strong a firewall between style and content.