Blackhat Review

At the very beginning of this year, I gave to you my yearly movie preview of movies I was excited about, nervous about, and on the fence about. On the list of movies I was excited about, the first movie I included was actually Blackhat. It looked like an intense thriller about a relevant subject matter that starred one of my favorite actors in Chris Hemsworth. They couldn't go wrong with this could they? What I failed to take into account is that this is the month of January. The only thing good about the month of January are the Holiday holdovers and the Oscar-contending expansion movies. It is always a bad month for new releases and this month so far as been a great example of that. The only good movie this month so far that was a new release is Paddington and that's only in January because Christmas got too crowded. But man. The Woman in Black 2? Taken 3? The Boy Next Door? Strange Magic? Mortdecai? It's been a terrible month so far for new releases. Unfortunately we have to add Blackhat to that list of slop, because no. This isn't a good movie.

Like I said, Blackhat stars Chris Hemsworth as an ex-convict that is trying to help the FBI stop a major cyber criminal. I called this a relevant movie because there actually has been a few recent cyber hacks that have scared some people, most notably when Sony was hacked right before the release of The Interview with the threat that 9/11-style attacks would happen if that movie was released. Is this a relevant movie? Nope. Not at all. That's sad because a really interesting opportunity was completely missed because this movie is just boring. We start with a whole ton of buildup. Not a bad strategy. I mean, something terrible is happening and one of our cyber gurus from the FBI mentions that the only person that can help them is his old roommate, who is currently in prison for hacking and robbing several banks. Ok, whatever. Then we get him out of prison and he helps and there is even more buildup and suddenly I'm wondering when the heck something is going to happen. Finally something does happen. A romance. Wait, what?

Chris Hemsworth is our prisoner that comes and helps us find the villain. And I hate to say it, but this is actually a miscast. Chris Hemsworth does not look like a computer hacker at all. You look at him and you think that this is a man who spends his all his free time working out in the gym, not learning all the tricks of computer hacking. It's a bit silly. But of course because of his looks, I mean he was voted as the sexiest man alive, soon after his old roommate breaks him out of prison that guy's sister immediately falls in love with him. Thus after a lot of buildup, we are suddenly witnessing the two all alone in a restaurant eating dinner together. I don't even remember how this happened. It just does. And it doesn't work. There is no chemistry between the two at all, but the movie keeps on going with it anyways, because... why? I have no idea. Cut it with the garbage and the romance, make the movie more intense and this could've been good. But no.

What happens after this first scene of romance? More building. Dang it movie, are you kidding me? DO SOMETHING!!! Then finally, we have a random scene where a few thugs walk in where Chris Hemsworth is and Hemsworth goes all Thor on them and kicks their trash single-handedly. Where did this come from? I thought he was supposed to be a computer hacker. How does he have time to be this good at fighting? Oh well, that was cool. But then we slow down again and do nothing. At this point, we are at least halfway through the movie, possibly more and since nothing is happening, the other three people in the theater with me get up and leave. I'm left all alone. I actually kind of enjoyed that. It's fun having the whole theater to yourself. Did you know that it is actually really comfortable if you lay across all the seats and watch all the movie? I wasn't planning on falling asleep. I didn't pay $7 to go take a nap, but I made myself comfortable. Then I got on my phone and browsed through facebook, responded to a few things, browsed around doing other useless things. I was bored. I was watching a thriller and it was not thrilling. By the way, don't touch your phone in the theater when there are other people in watching the movie with you. There's a reason why the theater yells at you to put your phone away a hundred times before starting. It's really annoying! But when you are the only one there, it's perfectly fine. And sometimes necessary.

KABOOM!!!!!!! Yup. Suddenly my phone is in my pocket and I'm sitting up paying attention. I don't really know why or how we went from being a computer-hacking thriller to a full out action movie, but we did. I'm not going to lie, there were actually several scenes in the second half of the movie that were really intense and fun to watch. It almost got to the point where I thought I was going to actually walk out and give it a positive review. But as soon as these action scenes happened, they quickly left and the movie went back to being a boring sludge-fest. Occasionally a fun scene showed up again and I got excited, but it quickly ended. No, this movie is not good. The advertising in this movie I thought was excellent. The trailer looks great. But it's boring as heck with a stupid romance and only a few fun action scenes that quickly come and go. Blackhat got completely ignored at the box office last weekend and for good reason. Don't bother giving this movie your money. My grade for Blackhat is a 5/10.