"Blackhat" is far from a perfect movie, mind you. Its rock-solid confidence in technical details isn't matched by similarly exacting attention to plot mechanics. Key roles are miscast or underwritten. Hemsworth's character, Nicholas Hathaway—a keyboard wizard furloughed from prison to help catch cyberterrorists who are stealing fortunes and wrecking nuclear plants—is implausibility Exhibit "A." "Blackhat" contrives a biography to justify this genius autodidact who reads Michel Foucault after lights-out, delivers mirrored epigrams in a Noo Yawk accent ("I did the time; time isn't doing me"), has Thor's chest and abs (push-ups, baby!), and can fight and shoot like John Wick and navigate irradiated nuclear plants in a hazmat suit. Despite Hemsworth's magnetism, Hathaway remains more a checklist of awesome than a credible person. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of his partners in justice, a racially and internationally diverse bunch. Their ranks include the sensitive/fearsome brother-sister duo of Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and Lien Chen (Wei Tang) and FBI agents Henry Pollack (John Ortiz), Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany) and Carol Barrett (Viola Davis). More so than in most Mann pictures—and this is saying a lot—these characters are more often lit and posed than explored.



Sometimes this feels like the right approach. The film spares us the usual "partners hate each other at first, then learn to work together" cliche by establishing that Hathaway and Chen were college roommates who love and respect each other; their embrace after reconnecting is shorthand that lets us instantly accept their Crockett-and-Tubbs-styled two-brained hive mind. The semi-obligatory love story between Hathaway and Lien is a Wong-Kar Wai oasis amid the snooping and chasing, all sexy smiles and furtive embraces. Leehom Wang's elegance is intoxicating: he glides across the screen like a dancer, necktie rippling.



Other times, though, you'll wish "Blackhat" had given every character another minute or two of attention, to make them pop like the crooks and cops in "Heat" and "Collateral." If you buy them anyhow, it's because the actors have committed to the movie's hallucinatory intensity while still projecting eccentric, personal qualities (Davis is a standout; her side-eye could be registered as a weapon), and because this is a rare thriller that creates a worldview to go with its world.



You could call this movie "Michael Mann's Greatest Hits" and mean it as a slam or a compliment, depending on your feelings about the director—but all the hits have been remixed and rethought. As written by Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl, photographed by Stuart Dryburgh ("The Piano," "Ameila"), and cut by a team of editors, "Blackhat" has enough fighting, shooting and brooding to satisfy fans of "Collateral" and "Heat," plus a bumper crop of trademark Mann images: daytime and nighttime skylines, existentially empty roads, cops and criminals posed against post-industrial landscapes, soul-mates having deep conversations in restaurants, reflections in rear-view mirrors and picture windows, brazenly off-center closeups, bespoke suits and designer sunglasses. These Mann-erisms feel newly poignant because they're celebrating light, space, architecture and flesh, even as the movie's heroes obsess over virtual conspiracies, and keep an eye peeled for coldblooded killers dispatched by hidden masters.

