“Blackhat” is a movie that cyber specialists will especially enjoy. Although I followed the plot for the most part, the filmmakers definitely lost me on a couple of occasions when they got into technical terms. But this movie is not simply a thinking person’s film. It features several action scenes including foot chases, fights, a bomb detonating a car, and a thrilling (if violent) conclusion. It has an “inside” joke too regarding Chris Hemsworth, “Thor” himself, as his character in this film, Nick Hathaway, is mentioned that he might “drop his big hammer.”
The movie opens with a computer sequence that leads to a power plant explosion in China. It is soon revealed that the explosion is a hack job. Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) and his sister Lien (Wei Tang) work to solve the case along with Carol Barrett (Viola Davis). It is Chen Dawai who suggests they get Hathaway to help, although he is stuck in prison in Pennsylvania. The captain knew him in the past but Hathaway is in solitary confinement for adding funds to prisoners’ accounts! He is quite a negotiator and insists that his time be commuted if he aids the team. The government wants to simply give him a furlough, but he wins the negotiation and lands his permanent freedom. Soon he joins the team and he and Lien become an item as they work together to find the hacker and stop him.
Solving the case will not come easily, however, and soon several members of the team are killed. Ultimately Hathaway and Lien are on their own and Hathaway will need all of his cyber skills to defeat the shrewd hacker who will stop at nothing, including more deaths, to get what he wants: more wealth. And Hathaway has more on his plate because the U.S. government wants him back for an illegal act in attempting to track down the murderous hacker.
Despite commendable ideas about getting a second chance and sacrificing to stop evil, the language, violence and sexual content prevent us from awarding the movie our Dove Seal.
