Chapeau noir

The IMdB mean score is near 5 as some people gave it 1 and some 10. Lack of distribution suggests a combination of these reviews are not honest, audiences have become fixated on a few formula, lots of people want thriller escape not reality reflection. The 2015 movie in my tech professional estimation indicated what was possible at the time. Watch it for yourself. Decide for yourself.

I waited a long time watching this movie because of all the bad summaries and ratings, but, here is my opinion. - Blackhat is an entertaining movie with an interesting visual language and I was really surprised how "not that bad" it is. Yeah sure, it doesn't have the dept of a Heat or Aviator, but it is still a solid peace - I Have a feeling that a lot of the people didn't understand Manns intentions in terms of camera, picture language and dramaturgy. The same thing happened with Miami vice! - My advice, watch it and form your own opinion and do not make the same mistake as me not watching it due to the opinion of others.

I must say when I watched the trailer for this movie I was skeptical, there are only a few hacker- movies that are enjoyable to watch.

Sometimes I am wrong and the movie turns out to be better then I expected but not in this case. I actually got quite annoyed watching this. The computer action looked authentic by using existing OS-es and interfaces but they still made huge mistakes. IP's with numbers higher than 255 is just plain stupid and accessing a top-secret NSA program with some simple social engineering looked convincing on screen but I doubt the NSA allows simple user/pass access to such tooling. I could go on and on...

I did like the idea of the plot, too bad the execution was so terrible. Probably the only thing I really liked where the two big shootout scenes, you saw a bit of Heat's director Mann there:)

Unsynced audio and weird changes in volume where also very annoying, something you don't expect from a $70mil movie.

I'm giving this a +1 because it tried to be authentic so a 4 bumps up to a 5/10 rating.

After a Chinese Nuclear plant is hacked, FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) insists the FBI work with the Chinese government to track the hacker down. She is finally convinced that this needs the help of super hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) who is serving a 15-year prison sentence.

I think most movies have an obligation to get the audience engaged, especially in the beginning. The beginning of this movie tried to dazzle us with computer hacking showing us what happens inside a computer with the CGI going wild, but it went on for too long and we started thinking of other things we needed to do like reorganizing our sock drawer. This was the first step in losing the audience.

The rest of movie slowly comes around trying to locate the hacker with huge amounts of Geek Teckno-babble losing us once again. Then with Nick's help we come to realize that this hack was not political, but something else. Yes, this is the "Twist" we come to believe is in every movie. And it is here the movie begins to make sense as more hacks come about disrupting economies throughout the world. Ah, so it's all about the money. Ah, we thought so. Once that is realized, the movie settles down to something we can finally understand: good guys vs the bad guys.

However, it is still slow-going as players stand around waiting for their lines. Add to this too many sub-titles that were too long to read before the scene changed and we lost the last 6-words or so. What were they thinking? Don't they know I never took that speed-reading course? Hey, I meant to.

A U.S. Marshall was supposed to stick with Nick everywhere he went, but we see him go to a restaurant to meet one of the hackers and no Marshall is in sight. Did the Continuity Girl (yeah, it's usually a girl) not read the script and mess up? Of course, there is a big fight here and, of course, Nick prevails, of course. Actually, this was a very good (read brutal) fight scene. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Probably the best part of the movie. Hey, who needs THOR?

This is tedious, but watchable because we keep hoping this will get better and it does in the last 15-minutes. The love interest between Nick and Chen (Tang Wei) is forced, but so were a lot of things in here. So what else is new? Most scenes were so short no player had any time to show off any acting talent. Long shots of player grimaces don't count. Now, about that sock drawer…………. (4/10)

Violence: Yes. Sex: No, we only see a make-out session. Nudity: No. Language: yes, some not much.

This film currently has an undeservedly low rating here on IMDb so it was with a bit of apprehension that I sat down to watch it and it proved to be much better than I had expected. The reason for the low rating I think is that the audiences today got too used to dumb 'action packed' crap like Taken that consists of little more than clichés and boring camera work. This movie dares to be different, it dares to be slow paced, watching it is like reading a book, it actually requires a mental effort on the part of the viewer to keep track of what's going on and naturally people these days don't like that. This film is from a different epoch, it's just too big and too multi-layered for the short attention span of the modern viewer weaned on vine videos. If you want to get an idea of what this movie is like without spoilers - think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Don't be discouraged by the low rating, it's just that slow-burn thrillers are not everyone's cup of tea these days.

It should also be noted that it's not just in its approach to story telling that this film dares to be different it's also in its cinematography. Once again, it feels like a film from a different time period that hearkens back to the classic noir movies of yesteryear, something like Three Days of the Condor.

And last but not least, it's quite refreshing to have a main character that thinks ahead rather than simply barging in and relying solely on the script writers to help him prevail in whatever situation they may find themselves in.