Michael Mann
Blackhat

Six years of nothing. A long time even for someone like Mann, who has always taken his breaks. A long period of inactivity after "Public Enemies." Then, finally, "Blackhat" arrived: 70 million budget, just over 17 earned, less than 8 in the USA, merciless criticism at home and beyond. Welcomed as a fiasco, "the first misstep since The Keep." In short, a film born poorly, at least according to many. Then there’s the other "faction" (not very numerous to be honest), speaking of yet another masterpiece. Where does the truth lie? Painfully banal answer: somewhere in between.

Michael Mann, the Dalai Lama of digital, is back with a cyber-action-crime-thriller-drama with a complex and intricate story. A "black hat" blows up a reactor at the Chai Wan nuclear power plant in China. The reason is difficult to define. But this event is followed by another, the work of the same man: the Stock Exchange is besieged to inflate the price of soybeans. This is the core from which the narrative in "Blackhat" starts, with a screenplay co-written by Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl. Here it is, the first and perhaps heaviest weak point of the work: an extremely intricate plot, often indecipherable, with script holes that emerge here and there. So much so that towards the end, a half "explanation" will arrive that is unfortunately essential to clarify many aspects that appeared fragmented. But it’s also a sort of admission of guilt, as if that explanation served to provide a complete sense to a story struggling to take off for 2 hours. The internalization of the drama, the more purely sentimental and poetic side is handled with dialogues that have nothing of the pathos attributable to Mann's past films.

On a narrative architecture leaking from almost every part, here is inserted the genius of the master, the pure class, the talent of staging. Few today direct a film as Michael Mann does. Every shot, from the "Mannian perspective" over the right shoulder of the characters, to the aerial glimpses of the metropolises, from close-ups to handheld cameras among insignificant streets, everything is the revival of the directorial elements so dear to good Michael. Mann's aesthetics is one of the prerogatives of his cinema. It's not the first time in his filmography that we find the dominance of image over word. And after all, cinema is born from this. Mann reminds us by measuring every light, every nuance, every shot.

In Mann's now extensive film life, "Blackhat" is the first true chapter where the Illinois filmmaker tackles the theme of "virtuality," the interpenetration of worlds and realities. Yet, looking more closely at the Mannian structure, one understands how "Blackhat" is nothing but the new page of a Western tale. The quintessential genre of American filmmaking is an integral part of Michael Mann's human trajectories: almost always his films are the clash between two characters from opposite dimensions. The modern outlaw and the detective ("Heat"), the ruthless man and the everyday man ("Collateral"), the metropolitan western "Thief," honor to be redeemed even beyond an unjust law ("The Insider"). The Western is an integral part of Michael Mann's films, almost expected for one raised on Peckinpah. Even in "Blackhat" we have a duel, even in this case there's someone searching and someone being searched for, up to a finale that is purely representative of Western duels. Mann is perhaps the American director who today most succeeds in making postmodern and classic coexist in his films.

A film with evident screenplay flaws and the usual flashes of class in staging. "Blackhat" does not reach the heights of "Heat," the introspection of "The Insider," doesn't convince like "Collateral," doesn’t have the historical breath of "Public Enemies." It is a film of complicated assimilation, but it is also the piece of a coherent path that Mann has been pursuing for decades, both thematically and stylistically.

One "Blackhat" is not enough to declare the Master dead.