So Michael Mann’s new action/drama Blackhat just got itself released in January… which is a very bad sign because January is where new releases go to die. This movie stars Chris Hemsworth (aka Thor) as a master computer hacker who has the disturbing trait of looking exactly like Chris Hemsworth after someone stole his shirt buttons.

The movie is about a mysterious hacker who causes a Chinese nuclear reactor to blow and then he steals money in the Soy Futures on the US stock market. So the Americans and the Chinese get together to track down the hackers… and only incarcerated Hemsworth hacker can help… using his startling lack of personality, muscles, and prison-shanking know-how. And hacking!

I should add the trailers are full of lies – it hides the film is largely set in China with a large Chinese cast (this isn’t bad, it’s just curiously misleading). it also suggests it’s about our interconnected world and how our lives and data are at risk from these evil hackers. But it’s not that at all. Nor is it really about hackers or their culture which is implied by the title Blackhat (as in, a blackhat is a criminal or generally a malcontent, a whitehat is a good guy hacker, usually employed to stop the blackhats). It’s not that at all, either.

The first half of this movie is a major bore… somber, gloomy, and really really dull. It tries to pump up the hacking scenes with that old canard of the camera zooming through the computer cables and circuits that never really works. It does make an attempt to not over-explain everything so I should give it credit for being – or trying to be – smart… but it was all just so dull and low energy that I cannot.

But then there’s an action set piece half-way through and I’m reminded that, yeah, Michael Mann knows how to stage a ground-level gunfight. It also stops being a boring cybercrime movie at this point, only coming back to it occasionally, but mainly it’s just Thor being a big damn hero cliche. When it becomes more of a globe-trotting spy flick, it gets a little better.

So the film is a failure but it could have been worse… because the skill Mann shows is occasionally on display here. Too bad he couldn’t prop up the whole movie… and it’s not like computer hacking can’t be cinematic (think The Social Network).

Score: 65