Michael Mann’s 2015 cyber-thriller “Blackhat,” with its steely visuals and ultra-serious tone, clearly sought to update computer-based espionage movies for a new generation. A lot of time had passed since the days of “Hackers” and “The Net,” and cyber-warriors — and their corresponding computer tools — now looked and behaved a lot differently. The film follows a computer engineer named Chen Lien (Tang Wei) and her cop brother Dawai (Leehom Wang) as they investigate a series of dangerous computer security breaches throughout China. They eventually find that the top-secret code used to hack their systems was written by hotshot hacker Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), who was Dawai’s old MIT roommate. Hathaway, however, is not the man responsible. As such, Hathaway is released from prison (he was serving time for hacking bank systems) and enlisted to help the Feds find the real hacker.
The film is ploddingly paced, poorly photographed, and difficult to follow, and our review at the time called it a contender for one of the worst films of the year. Mann tries to add a lot of his signature smoky realism to the film, but “Blackhat” is one of those examples of how a less artistic, more efficiently schlocky approach would have better served the material. The film was panned by critics (it only has a 32% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and bombed pretty hard at the box office, only making $19.7 million on a $70 million budget. “Blackhat” was proof that Chris Hemsworth, then best known for playing Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, couldn’t open a film on his own. “Blackhat” remains Hemsworth’s second lowest-grossing film of all time, beaten only by the obscure 2010 film “Ca$h,” which made $46,488 on a $7 million budget.
Back in 2023, Mann was interviewed by Variety, and he accepted all the blame for the failure of “Blackhat.” Mann admitted that the script, credited to Morgan Davis Foehl, needed a few more drafts. Mann also felt, perhaps with a bit of arrogance, that “Blackhat” was too accurate for its own good.
Michael Mann felt that ‘Blackhat’ was too accurate for modern audiences
Before “Blackhat” was released, this author recalled rumors and scuttlebutt that it was the most accurate depiction of computer hackers ever seen in a motion picture. Hacking wasn’t flashy and stylized like in 1995’s “Hackers,” but terse and sunless. Mann did his homework, and actual cyber-security professionals noted how true-to-life the movie was, in terms of the way hackers looked and behaved, but also in the way computers actually functioned in 2015.
That accuracy, however, may have come at the expense of cinematic dynamism. Mann felt that “Blackhat” didn’t grab people because it was too ahead of its time. Too many audiences, he implied, had been trained to accept cyber-thrillers as flashy and pulpy, and they weren’t ready for a gray, drab version of the genre. His exact quote to Variety was:
“It’s my responsibility. The script was not ready to shoot. The subject may have been ahead of the curve, because there were a number of people who thought this was all fantasy. Wrong. Everything is stone-cold accurate.”
According to the same Variety article, Mann tried to improve “Blackhat” for a 2016 screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He re-edited the film, trying to make it tighter, and felt that he succeeded. The new cut featured some shortened scenes, the addition of a new scene, and the movement of one of the film’s striking cyber-attacks from the very beginning to the middle of the film. Mann then re-edited the film a second time in 2017 in a “director’s cut” that aired exclusively on FX. The final director’s cut wasn’t released on home video until 2023.
The director’s cut may be an improvement, but the theatrical cut was a bust. The film may only persist as a classroom example for editing students. Or for people interested in stone-cold accuracy in their cyber-thrillers.
