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Matt Glasby

There is a scene in the British sitcom Peep Show, written by Jesse Armstrong (of Succession fame) and Sam Bain, where the main characters, Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell), are stuck in the audience of a boring play.
“I’ve got Heat on DVD at home,” says Jez, despairingly. “We’re watching this, when for less money we could be watching Robert de Niro and Al Pacino.”
“I’m going to pretend I am watching Heat,” decides Mark.
Viewers of Blackhat (2015), a rare misfire from Heat director Michael Mann, may well feel the same. So how did a US$70 million thriller by one of the world’s finest filmmakers miss the target so badly?


When a hacker sends a Hong Kong nuclear reactor into meltdown, Captain Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom) of the PLA cyberwarfare unit joins forces with FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) to catch them.
Along the way he recruits his sister, Chen Lien (Tang Wei, Wang’s Lust, Caution co-star), and his old MIT roommate, Nicholas Hathaway (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth), who is in a US prison for hacking banks.
‘You can hide in Hong Kong’: how city made Chris Evans movie Push feel real
Once Hathaway has been released, they are hot on the hacker’s trail. For the most part, this involves a lot of angry typing and furrowed brows, although Hathaway and Lien eventually get to travel the world talking tech and kicking a**, like cast-offs from the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Essentially it is a film about malware, which is pretty difficult to dramatise, even for a master like Mann. To get round the problem, he includes a number of whizzy CG shots that take us inside the internet, forgetting that Fight Club did something similar way back in 1999.
To hold our interest, the film explodes into expertly filmed action set pieces every half an hour, but just how Hathaway became so handy with his fists is never satisfactorily explained.

With his Asgardian good looks and husky, Rocky Balboa voice, Hemsworth is rather more convincing punching people than punching keys. It does not help that he is saddled with some terrible dialogue.
“I did the crime, I do the time, time doesn’t do me,” he tells Lien. “What does that mean?” she asks, with good reason.
Frankly, you wonder how anyone kept a straight face during such tech-heavy exposition as, “The blackhat (hacker) then used his back door to inject a second part: its payload.”
If Hemsworth is miscast as Hathaway, the secondary characters are all but forgotten, particularly the Chinese ones. Lien, who becomes Hathaway’s lover, is repeatedly male-gazed by the camera, which looks her up and down approvingly.

Dawai, meanwhile, has little to do after the first half-hour but die. Even the main villain, Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen), is kept anonymous until the final showdown.
The decision to shoot in Hong Kong feels more political than personal – especially as the production company, Legendary Pictures, was bought by Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group a year later. As ever, the city makes a dramatic backdrop for the various chases and shoot-outs, but that is all it ever is.
The climax sees Hathaway and Lien travelling to Malaysia and Indonesia, and you feel the action could just have easily been set in either of these countries.

But perhaps the film’s biggest flaw is ideological. The Chinese government monitors its citizens’ internet access as much as any other on the planet – yet the script, by Morgan Davis Foehl, does not mention this once. Maybe, as some commentators have suggested, it was censored by the Chinese as well.
That would certainly explain why America’s sinister National Security Agency, which has been accused of mass surveillance on a colossal scale, is heavily criticised, but the Chinese government gets a free pass.
Ultimately, nobody seemed happy with the results: Mann screened a “revised cut” less than a year later; Hemsworth admitted to feeling miscast; and the film made just US$20 million at the box office.

Perhaps everyone did stay home to watch Heat instead.
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook


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American cinema

How Michael Mann’s 2015 film Blackhat mixes hacking, Thor’s Chris Hemsworth and Hong Kong to disappointing effect

Tang Wei and Chris Hemsworth ride an escalator in a station on Hong Kong MTR subway network in a still from “Blackhat” (2015). Michael Mann’s 2015 film had plenty of expertly filmed action set pieces, but little else going for it. Photo: Universal Pictures

Wang Leehom in a still from “Blackhat”. Photo: Edko Films Limited/Kingmart Advertising Company

Hemsworth (left) and director Michael Mann on the set of “Blackhat”. Photo: Edko Films Limited/Kingmart Advertising Company

Tang and Wang in a still from “Blackhat”. Photo: Edko Films Limited/Kingmart Advertising Company

Hemsworth in a still from “Blackhat”. Photo: Edko Films Limited/Kingmart Advertising Company

Ranked: the 10 best movies of Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Venice Film Festival 2023 lifetime achievement awardee

Tony Leung Chiu-wai at an interview with the Post in 2009. Photo: SCMP

Tony Leung Chiu-wai at an interview with the Post in 2005. Having appeared in nearly 100 movies, he is about to be honoured by the Venice Film Festival with a lifetime achievement award. We pick the actor’s 10 best movies. Photo: SCMP

How Disney got kicked out of China over Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a 1997 movie that ripped a hole in US-China relations

Tulku Jamyang Kunga Tenzin is bowed to in a scene from the film &apos;Kundun&apos;, 1997. (Photo by Buena Vista/Getty Images)

A scene from Martin Scorsese’s 1997 movie Kundun, about the early life of the Dalai Lama, which left a scar on US-China relations and saw Disney kicked out of China. Photo: Getty Images

A scene from Kundun. Photo: Walt Disney Studios

Martin Scorsese at a press conference on Kundun in Rome on March 9, 1998. Photo: AP

Tulku Jamyang Kunga Tenzin (front) in a scene from Kundun. Photo: Getty Images

How Bait 3D, an Australia-Singapore shark movie co-production, became a monster hit at the Chinese box office

A still from “Bait 3D”.

Sharni Vinson (left) and Xavier Samuel in a still from “Bait 3D” (2012), which took the Chinese box office by storm.

“Bait 3D” has “the requisite mix of gore, bad CGI and ‘Jaws’ jokes”. 

Adrian Pang as Jessup in a still from “Bait 3D”.

Clean up on aisle three: a great white shark menaces shoppers in a still from “Bait 3D”.

How Jackie Chan vehicle Skiptrace, a 2016 US-China co-production by Hollywood director Renny Harlin, put the clash in culture clash

Jackie Chan as Benny Chan and Johnny Knoxville as US gambler Connor Watts in a still from US-China co-production Skiptrace (2016). Photo: Intercontinental Film Distributors

Fan Bingbing as Samantha (left), the daughter of Jackie Chan’s partner, and Johnny Knoxville as American gambler Connor Watts (right) in a still from “Skiptrace”.

Film director Renny Harlin in Hong Kong in 2019. Photo: Edmond So

Jackie Chan as Hong Kong detective Benny Chan in a still from “Skiptrace”.

Fan Bingbing in a still from “Skiptrace”.

How US-China co-production The 355, starring Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain and Fan Bingbing, failed on all fronts

Jessica Chastain as Mason “Mace” Brown in a still from “The 355”, co-written and directed by Simon Kinberg.

(From left) Diane Kruger as Marie, Jessica Chastain as Mason “Mace” Brown and Lupita Nyong’o as Khadijah in a still from “The 355”, co-written and directed by Simon Kinberg. The US-China co-production, which also featured Fan Bingbing, was a box office flop.

Co-writer/director Simon Kinberg (left) and Jessica Chastain on the set of The 355.

Fan Bingbing as Lin Mi Sheng in a still from The 355, co-written and directed by Simon Kinberg.

(From left) Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o and Diane Kruger in a still from The 355.

Lifestyle

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Film & TV

Chris Hemsworth was miscast as a hacker in Blackhat, a rare misfire from Heat director Michael Mann that underutilised its Chinese actors and Hong Kong setting
Perhaps the film’s biggest flaw is that it is happy to point out the flaws in America’s government monitoring its people, but not China’s doing the same to its


Michael Mann’s 2015 film Blackhat – which combines hacking, Chris Hemsworth and Hong Kong to disappointing effect – has plenty of expertly filmed action set pieces, but little else to offer.
