Chapeau noir

En revanche, on reconnaît tout du long le style nerveux et le prodigieux sens de l'image du réalisateur de The insider.

Blackhat est sans équivoque la proposition la plus dure et la plus brute de Mann, à la fois sublime et étourdissante, quoiqu'imparfaite.

Du coup, quand les 133 minutes du film sont enfin écoulées, on pousse un gigantesque soupir de soulagement, en regrettant seulement d’avoir perdu sa soirée et de précieuses heures de sommeil à regarder ce mauvais film.

The urgent, provoking Blackhat is art imitating the perils of cyber-life, and Mann is just the groundbreaking artist to do it.

The dialogue, mostly crisp and sparse, can lapse into corny as well, and a single line of pointed backstory for Davis' character feels tacked-on.

There are actually some interesting concepts and perspectives on the modern world present in Blackhat, as the techno-centric plot and the forced international alliances forged as a result provide realizations of just how small the world has become, but it comes together in a package that’s unfortunately largely underwhelming.

The problem, I think, is that Mann hasn’t reconfigured himself for his new milieu.

Given Sony's recent travails, the timing couldn’t be better for a movie about the vulnerability of international computer networks, but Blackhat is too much of an embarrassment to cash in its zeitgeist points.

The plot isn't twisty enough to be surprising or satisfying, the dialogue seems cribbed from an old RadioShack catalog, and the performances are lifelessly flat. 

It's intimate, emotional, vicious: flesh is punctured, blood spilled.

Au final, aucun élément ne parvient à nous maintenir dans ce flot de plans intéressants individuellement, mais qui peine à former un tout convaincant… ce que l'on est en droit d'attendre d'un film.

(...)  the film might have been more unsettling had its villain turned out to be a capricious kid — or scarier yet, had he remained a ghost in the machine, a force with no face, nor any hat to speak of.

While Blackhat is obviously not top-tier Mann, at times it comes close enough and a slightly diminished Mann is still better than just about everybody else.