Blackhat - Chris Hemsworth's Abs

I never really expected "Blackhat" to be particularly good, but I never bought the opinions coming in from the US about it being absolutely horrible. It cost 70 million USD to produce, and only brought in just under 4 million USD in its opening weekend (16th - 18th of January). On the overall list for its weekend it made a million less than "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" which had already been out for a month. Opening weekends are always the best weekends, so "Blackhat" is a certified bomb. But did it deserve to lose that much money?

I wouldn't say it deserved to be such a huge flop as it is, but I would neither say that it deserved to earn as much as its budget suggests it should. It was a completely standard film that had very little going for it. There's nothing to see here that you haven't seen done better before. But it is entertaining, most of the time. It didn't feel like a 133-minute film. I can recognise parts that could have been cut out to tighten it up, but it didn't drag on like a lot of other films do when they reach that kind of runtime. The beginning is its worst part, which will serve it no favours when it will eventually have to cater to cable and VOD customers. It takes ages to get to a point which is interesting enough to catch your attention. We are not even sure who the main character is until maybe ten minutes into the film.

It doesn't do itself any favours in term of visuals either. They switch back and forth between being generic and readable, to experimental and distracting. Suddenly they'll cut to something completely different and move the camera differently than they did in the previous cut. And some of VFX shots look like actual placeholders that never should have made it into a film of this caliber. There is one in particular where they have placed a blurred out person on top of a surveillance feed to make it appear to be hidden in a public place, but the person never moves. I am not talking about a person who just stands still, I'm talking pixels that stand still. At some points they move the person slightly, to make it appear not completely static, and it's so easy to see. If it's not a placeholder shot that somehow made it to the final cut, someone deserves to have their job history looked at.

Overall this is a completely okay film. There are better films to watch in theatres if you absolutely want to go. This can wait till a cold Sunday afternoon when it happens to pop up under "related titles" after a Netflix binge watch of "Boston Legal". Unless you want to watch Chris Hemsworth's abs on the big screen before "Age of Ultron" later this spring. Then hurry before they cut the release short!