Chris Hemsworth

We’re off to a weird start in this instalment of Not Forgotten, because it’s also an instalment of Danger – UXB. Yep, a double bill, if you like. Just wait until we get to Matt Damon. That’s a triple-threat special.

I digress. So, Chris Hemsworth, A-lister. Yeah, that just sort of happened, didn’t it? He’s part of the Great Aussie Annexation of Hollywood. Don’t get me wrong – I think he fits in very nicely as the first name you see on a movie poster. He’s a big, blond, muscular, golden-haired hunk of a man, isn’t he? Certainly looks the hero, all square-jawed and everything. He seems to effortlessly ooze charisma, too.

I don’t expect you to take my word for it. Aged 19, Hemsworth got his start in that most Aussie of ways. He appeared on Neighbours in 2002, before swapping it for the treadmill of a long stint on Home and Away. It must have been a success, because he appeared on Dancing with the Stars Australia in 2006. Eventually, he got a shot at Hollywood. A five-minute shot, to be exact. After Matt Damon (here he is again) decided he didn’t want a cameo in J J Abrams Star Trek as Kirk’s father, Hemsworth grabbed the opportunity with both hands and critics were wowed by him. Abrams gave him five minutes and Hemsworth made himself a mega-star.

There’s a fun article from Hollywood Reporter in 2010 which features him and a bunch of other actors. The A-list redefined, it says. It’s not exactly accurate about the careers of the nine men featured. Yes, Chris Pine isn’t a thing any more. Taylor Lautner’s star never shone over-bright. Taylor Kitsch...was unlucky in his choice of roles, shall we say, and Sam Worthington is mostly famous for being a blue cat-man-thing for James Cameron. The less said about Shia LaBoeuf, the better. But they were right about Hemsworth

He had a few more small roles before auditioning for Thor, and that launched him for once and for all. Thor isn’t the greatest entry in the MCU, although as a body of work, the MCU is decidedly patchy. He’s decent as Thor, and his turn in Thor: Ragnarok is fantastic. Thor, in fact, makes up a substantial part of his filmography. And he’s always reliable in the role, even when hamstrung by a bone-headed script as in Thor: Love and Thunder (Ragnarok worked because it wasn’t trying to be goofy all the time. Love and Thunder rarely aims for gravity).

When he isn’t playing the Norse god of thunder with the plummiest of British accents, I’ve found his performances to be typically good or better. There are very few actors who could legitimately manage to portray the notorious playboy F1 driver James Hunt, as Hemsworth did convincingly in Rush. His capacity for the more physical aspect of action acting isn’t quite at the same absurd peak as Keanu Reeves, but as shown by the two Extraction movies, he is pretty damn good at gunplay and martial arts for an A-lister. I don’t think he has the dramatic chops to win any of the big awards yet, and his choices for projects show no hunger to chase them. He’s capable, he’s reliable, he’s handsome. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Hemsworth.

In 2013, Hemsworth was cast in a film by Michael Mann. Mann, at that point, had enjoyed thirty years in Hollywood as a well-regarded director of stylish and propulsive movies. He brought the world Heat, and in Heat is that bank robbery, a sequence so influential it changed forever how realistic gunfights in movies needed to be. He also brought us Tom Cruise as a bad guy in Collateral. So when Mann got a bee in his bonnet about hacking following the Stuxnet affair – a computer worm disabled a load of Iranian nuclear centrifuges – and brought in ex-hackers and former NSA types as consultants, you knew it was going to be taken seriously. A beautifully shot, angsty take on the hacker movie starring one of the industry's hottest actors. Can’t miss.

Blackhat opens with a barrage of bizarre imagery. The moon! Circuit boards! Water pumps! Flashing lights on circuit boards! And then a nuclear reactor melts down in China. A bad black hat hacker is behind it, and then another attack on a soy futures exchange in Chicago. The Chinese government are quite upset and work with the FBI to find out what’s going on. The investigation is led by Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and, for some reason, his sister Lien (Tang Wei), who asks FBI Agent Barrett (Viola Davis) to release his old college roomie, Hathaway (Hemsworth), because the code the hacker used was created by Dawai and Hathaway in college. Hathaway is only too willing to help because he’s been banged up in chokey after being caught hacking assorted banks. If Hathaway can lead them to the black hat, then he gets to go free, although he’ll be watched by US Marshal Jessup (Holt McCallany).

Hathaway’s investigations swiftly bear fruit, leading him and Lien to a Korean restaurant meeting with the black hat’s partner. Hathaway gets suspicious, finds a computer broadcasting video to a remote location, and then taunts the black hat. Then a bunch of ruffians pile into the restaurant, threaten our heroes but discover that Hathaway has spent his time in the slammer becoming some kind of hand-to-hand combat god. He pounds three big ole bruisers into the dirt, and then spends the rest of the night pounding his hammer into Lien in the world’s least earned romance subplot ever.

Off the team zoom to Hong Kong, following the clues. They find a very bad dude called Kassar operating there but Kassar knows they’re coming, slaughters the Hong Kong special police unit and gets away. This doesn’t discourage our heroes for long. They venture into the radioactive control room of the nuclear power plant and recover some corrupted data. Hathaway takes the bold step of hacking the NSA chief’s account to gain access to their super-secret Black Widow mega-software. He uses this to discover from the corrupted data that the black hat is in Jakarta.

This pisses off literally everyone at the FBI and NSA and they want Hathaway back in prison. But Dawai and Lien decide to help Hathaway escape so he can keep helping them. The three of them run away, but before they get away, Dawai gets bazookaed to death by Kassar and Barrett and Jessup go down all guns blazing.

In Malaysia, Hathaway realizes the black hat wants to use the worm to drive up the price of tin by flooding several Malaysian tin mines. He then hacks the black hat’s bank accounts, steal all of his money, and arranges to meet the black hat to join him in a partnership. Both sides expect a double-cross and the film ends with Hathaway mega-killing the black hat and all of his men in the middle of a massive public gathering in Jakarta before getting away scot-free.

Whew. Sounds exciting, am I right?

Nope. Blackhat is possibly the most leaden-footed and tension-free thriller I’ve watched in a long time.

My favourite hobby horse has been begging for a ride, so here it is: this film fails as a dramatic endeavour because it doesn’t actually have any characters in it. It has cardboard cut-outs. To illustrate the point, I’m going to refer back to what Red Letter Media posed as the ‘Qui Gonn Jin Problem’. Think about Qui-Gonn from the Phantom Menace and try to describe him without mentioning his appearance or profession. Good luck. Now, Red Letter Media played it as a joke, but I’m deadly serious. Every single character in this movie suffers from this disorder. I cannot begin to describe to you Hathaway as a character. His motivation is clear – get out of prison – but what is he like? No clue. He has no personality traits. This is true for every character in the film. They all have a defined want, but the screenplay refuses to define or differentiate them beyond their job and motivation.

I found it utterly impossible to give a damn about Hathaway or anyone else in this movie. Everyone is hyper-competent and ultra-motivated and convinced they are in the right. Since I made no emotional connection with the characters, there are no emotional stakes. It doesn’t actually matter if they live or die. Dawai gets his limbs scattered in an explosion? Well, I didn’t see it coming, but, you know, so what? The whole romance subplot? The one where you have a hot Chris Hemsworth making eyes at a hot Tang Wei and see the subplot coming the moment they meet? There is no reason given for why they hook up. There is no sexual tension between them. They just bang and it turns out convict cock is just the thing Lien had been hankering for her whole life, to the point of professional misconduct.

Stakes matter in stories. Here’s what’s at risk if our heroes fail to stop the bad guys: some investors will lose money. That’s it. This is a story about preventing a load of dollars from changing bank accounts. Why should we care? Why does anyone care? When a film spaffs its highest stake concept over the opening five minutes, it’s hard to stay engaged. Sure, the shoot-outs are well-staged. The hand-to-hand combat is plausibly brutal. But I don’t care because the stakes are almost non-existent and the characters thinner than tissue paper. No stakes and tension equals no pace and this is a slow, slow movie.

It’s even harder to be excited when the topic of the film is hacking. Nobody – nobody – will ever manage to make hacking thrilling. Some dude is tapping away at a keyboard, trying to melt through the old Gibsonian ice and access the mainframe. It’s so exciting watching the lines of code! Ooh, here’s some special effects depicting the innards of a computer! Oh no, he’s only got ten seconds before the feds complete their trace! Fuck off. It looks boring. It is boring.

The tragedy is that even if Mann somehow found a way to make this very relevant issue interesting visually or narratively, he cast possibly the least credible kind of actor as his hero. Hemsworth is much, much too hench to convince as a hacker. For sure, there’ll be hackers out there who have 5% body fat and abs you could bounce snooker balls off. They’re like Bigfoot - until you show them to me, I can’t accept they exist. As a hacker, Hemsworth doesn’t pass the sniff test. Worse, as a hacker, Hathaway doesn’t pass the sniff test either, because he isn’t just a god-tier coder who has the body of a Norse god, he’s also astonishingly competent at close combat. Where did he learn to do that? Are federal penitentiaries running the MCMAP to entertain the prisoners? The implausibility of Hathaway as an uber-hacker, in Hemsworth’s body, fighting like John Wick is off the scales.

But Phil, I hear you ask, there must be something good in this movie? What about the performances? Well, voice in my head, since you ask, the cast in this film perform their roles adequately. Viola Davies as an FBI agent? Sure, I buy her performance. Holt McCallany as a US Marshal? Sure, his too. I remind you, characters who dissolve in the rain. There’s nothing here for capable actors to anchor a performance in.

Alright, but, Michael Mann. Stylist! The film looks great, right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong. Mann had long had a taste for digital video at this point. He used it a lot in Collateral and Public Enemies. One of my abiding memories of Public Enemies is how cheap it looks at times, like someone smeared a thin layer of margarine over the lens. Digital video doesn’t have to result in a drab, flat shot. But it does when you’re Michael Mann. Blackhat was shot entirely on digital and by God does it look like he shot it on a cheap smartphone. Washed-out colours – and not the deliberate, artful kind of desaturation – zero depth of field, zero sense of scale or spectacle, zero impact of dark or bright. Blackhat is one of the ugliest movies I’ve ever seen. For shame, Mr Mann.

Further, Mann is on record as saying Blackhat’s failure is his fault because the script wasn’t ready. No shit. Blackhat took a year to edit, and after that, Mann went back into the edit suite, rearranged a bunch of stuff and released a director’s cut which, apparently, fixes many of the issues with pace and stakes. I don’t care enough about this film to pay for the DVD to find out if Mann has managed to redeem himself. If you can’t find the director’s cut, don’t watch this film. It’s a disaster from beginning to end. Implausible, and boring, and as ugly as sin. Avoid.