Sitting around 30% at Rotten Tomatoes, Blackhat is a $70-million production that has yet to recover a mere $15 million from the box office worldwide. And now it’s been pulled from all but a few theatres. How is it that a film from one of America’s most distinctive and longest working auteurs has done this poorly, both critically and financially?
Michael Mann is one of the most striking visually minded filmmakers working today. Even though the general critical consensus has been lacking, there are a number of respected critics who admire it, including Matt Zoller Seitz, Keith Uhlich, and Glenn Heath Jr. And even in the bad reviews, most critics allow that Mann’s visual style is intact. It’s been lauded as being remarkably realistic in its portrayal of hacking(taking into account dramatic license), a hot topic which rarely gets a plausible take in Hollywood. It’s not surprising though, given Mann’s propensity for that true to life element in his films: in his debut, Thief, Mann used the actual safe breaking equipment of the thief consultant on the film, choosing to cut through a real safe door rather than use a fake. Taking this into account, as well as the high praises sung by certain critics, Blackhat doesn’t seem like should be taking the abuse it has. It may be an odd duck, but it’s certainly not a lame one. Why, then, is Blackhat being met with such vitriol? Expectations must certainly play a role. Marketing for the film focused on the star power of Chris Hemsworth, the relevance of its subject matter to current events, and play it up as an exciting thriller a la the Bourne series.
The problem is that while Blackhat is more of an impressionistic thriller, as Mann disregards conventional wisdom and three dimensional characters in favour of frames to present his imagery. An overcooked plot is boiled down to the barest of bones in the last act, when Blackhat veers away from international spy thriller to a story of personal vengeance. In truth, the plot doesn’t matter much, but that’s part of its problem. Proponents of Blackhat have all been connoisseurs of Michael Mann himself, who are almost using the film as a proxy to expound on the often overlooked virtues of his style. They dismiss criticisms of dialogue or dramatical dissonance as missing the point: the cinematic joyride of Mann’s visuals.
The compelling element to this line of reasoning is the appeal to a more abstract, elemental vision of cinema which tells its story through its images rather than through the paper thin veneer of its script. A story can be told in another medium, but cinema has a language unto itself which can, at times, transcend the story. In this way, Blackhat is almost an arthouse film, favoring experimentation and daring moves instead of settling into another genre picture we’ve all seen a thousand times.
Mann has a disregard for time and continuity in his editing, eliding time as he cuts between past and future images, at times allowing the audience a glimpse forward before he takes us back to the present of the characters. Two characters sit down at a restaurant, and lose themselves in conversation, two seconds later they’re halfway through their meal, continuing the same conversation, barely missing a beat. We never see deliberate over menus, or give an order to the waiter – Mann compresses the scene as tightly as possible to achieve a slightly surreal feel that’s still grounded in reality.
And as is Mann’s habit, the sound design is overbearing; keyboards are struck with explosive force, the roar of an airplane’s engine lingers in scenes after its source is gone, or even before it’s on screen; gunshots have a larger than life presence, and the pulsating score drowns out dialogue at whim. To some this is a sure sign of poor sound design; a mistake which Mann failed to correct. To my mind, it’s a conscious decision in line with his previous films, and rather than a flaw, it’s used to intensify the atmosphere of the world Mann creates in the film, at the expense of unnecessary exposition.
Whether Mann is immersing the scene into a digitalized landscape of circuitry and signals à la Tron, or revelling in the neon saturated streets of Hong Kong, Mann’s mise-en-scène is an ever present force which drives the film forward regardless of the plot. But in exploring how to tell a story visually, Blackhat becomes muddled jumble of exquisite sounds and sights which doesn’t blend with the generic, workman-esque approach to characters and dialogue. The film is bogged down by the inconsistency of quality – Blackhat doesn’t connect its characters to the audience, or even to each other, in a believable way. Elements like the romance between Hathaway and Lien Chen, which seems to bother most of the film’s audience because of the lack of explanation, bothers me simply for the lack of chemistry. Mann’s serendipitous tendencies in character interactions are par for the course in fiction, but without the emotions to ground them, the relationships fall flat. Again though, perhaps this is missing the crux of Mann’s vision. Consider this scene: after making love, Hathaway begins to relate his past to Lien – finally, we may get some relevant backstory to help us understand our protagonist! – only for the ambient sound and pulsing score make it all but inaudible. Deliberately so, too. Mann isn’t interested in specific details of the past, it’s irrelevant to the film he’s trying to make.
This holds true in the climax of the film. Thematically, structurally, and visually, Mann has crafted a brilliant scene in which Hathaway and the villains are isolated, in community only with each other, like so many bits of data connected amidst a forest of other bits which ignore them completely. An Indonesian ritual has swathes of crimson clad, torch bearing men and women marching forward as Hathaway pursues his targets in the opposite direction, cutting through them as they seem not to notice his presence. It’s a brilliant scene, except it’s emotionally inert; the villain dies, quickly, unremarkably, and without any sense of accomplishment. It could be read as a subversion of the Hollywood tendency to present such conflicts in unrealistic, Bond level proportions, but at times it feels like a simple fizzling out.
It’s this give and take, this cinematic tension between a visionary’s style and genre’s convention that is dividing moviegoers. Although I wish audiences would embrace Blackhat, I think it’s easy to see why it fell flat for most of them. Poor marketing mixed with false expectations and a visual style for more suited for a festival than mass multiplexes, Blackhat simply isn’t catered for today’s moviegoers. Yet, for all its flaws, I have a sneaking suspicion that Blackhat will stand the test of time much better than other films which succeed on the dramatic level but which are remarkably absent of the qualities of great cinema, leaving the viewers’ senses dull, such as The Imitation Game or The Theory of Everything.