The movie that sent Michael Mann into Hollywood exile: “It’s my responsibility”
To a certain generation of moviegoers, Michael Mann movies will always be treats sprinkled by the movie gods onto the cinema landscape. To these people – myself included – even his middling movies are better than 90% of the films made in Hollywood.
This undying devotion is especially impressive when you consider that, in a movie career that is now in its fifth decade, Mann has only directed 12 feature films. However, that dozen includes seismic pictures like Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, and, of course, his magnum opus, Heat.
Over the years, Mann’s command of his particular brand of muscular, meticulous, and high-minded action thriller has hit the mark more often than not, but he has also whiffed on a few occasions. For example, his 2006 Miami Vice film, an update of the TV show he was instrumental in bringing to life in the 1980s, was an oddly subdued, bafflingly-plotted project. Still, as a testament to Mann’s exalted status, it inspired a dedicated cult following in the decades after its release.
Undoubtedly Mann’s biggest misfire, though, was 2015’s Blackhat, a cyber thriller that teamed him with a young Hollywood upstart named Chris Hemsworth. At that point, Hemsworth had played the God of Thunder in two Thor movies for Marvel, plus the Avengers team-up, but Blackhat was one of his first efforts aimed at proving his stardom could be transferrable outside the world of capes and spandex.
Sadly, Blackhat ultimately didn’t satisfy its star or director, who both admitted it was a failure in the years following its chastening $19.7million gross at the box office on a budget of $70m. Hemsworth, who played the world’s most handsome and jacked computer hacker in the movie, admitted to Variety in 2019, “I didn’t enjoy what I did in the film. It just felt flat, and it was also an attempt to do what I thought people might have wanted to see. But I don’t think I’m good in that space.”
As for Mann, he also fessed up to Variety that he struggled from the beginning to coalesce Blackhat‘s thriller, action, and romance elements into a satisfactory whole, mostly because he started work with a script that wasn’t up to snuff. “It’s my responsibility,” he admitted. “The script was not ready to shoot.”
While Mann was happy to admit this flaw, there was one criticism aimed at the film that he took umbrage with. Many detractors accused it of being an unrealistic depiction of cybercrime, primarily because of Hemsworth’s casting and some of the more elaborate cyberattacks depicted, such as a nuclear power plant melting down when a cybercriminal hacks into its coolant system. Fighting back against this perception, the Ali director argued that the film was simply ahead of its time, as all the things purported in the movie were “stone-cold accurate.”
He mused, “The subject may have been ahead of the curve, because there were a number of people who thought this was all fantasy. Wrong.”
Whatever the case, Mann’s directing career took a serious hit after the film’s spectacular failure at the box office. It would take him eight long years to get another movie to the big screen: his excellent Enzo Ferrari biopic, Ferrari, starring Adam Driver. During his years in exile, though, Mann didn’t just twiddle his thumbs.
Instead, he re-cut Blackhat in 2016 for a Brooklyn Academy of Music retrospective of his career, shifting around the positioning of the cyberattacks in the film. This new ‘Director’s Cut’ made the movie much easier to follow for audiences, and it was shown on the FX network in 2017, before being released on Blu-ray and 4K in 2023. This cut received a much warmer response from critics across the board, proving once again that even Mann’s lesser movies have the potential for greatness.
