Review...."Black Hat"

I usually like M. Mann films but this one was painful to sit thru. Weak, weak script/story, just trying to hard with the cyperspeak to appear hip. wooden characters just going thru the motions with little or poor direction, enough continuity glitches to make you roll your eyes. Overpowering music to try and make you think something interesting was about to happen. An jittery steady cam shots to make you sick at your stomach and to compound the nausea; sound that never did seem to find an appropriate level. Let's not even talk about the editing. Dark and sloppy overall....

But....

Mann is a master at capturing a cinematic mood with fantastic nitetime scenes; as a sometimes DP, the cinematography was great except for the already mentioned poor steady cam work. Wait for the dvd if you must see pretty boy Thor.

a reply to: olaru12

Thanks for the review.
Hacker movies are generally silly. Two that come to mind are 'Live Free Or Die Hard' and 'Swordfish'.

Whenever they show a hacker "hacking", it involves typing for appx 5 seconds.

The evil Gabrielle character in Live Free was able to control everything on the planet through his mobile
command center. Classic. He could scramble F-18s to attack Bruce Willis. By typing a line of code (5 seconds)
he could override any existing instruction anywhere, on anything.

In Swordfish, the "Stanley" character said "I can see the code in my head."

A real hacker once said that a real hacker movie wouldn't be cool or romantic because it would show a guy
typing lines of code at 3:00 A.M. and there's a good chance there wouldn't be hot, half-naked chicks running around.

Mann is a master at capturing a cinematic mood with fantastic nitetime scenes. Wait for the dvd if you must see pretty boy Thor.

I liked Mann's 2004 film 'Collateral'.