Michael Mann on ‘Blackhat’ Failure: “It’s My Responsibility. The Script Was Not Ready”

“Blackhat,” Michael Mann's cyber-tech thriller from 2015, was panned by critics, but, over the years, has somehow been reappraised by a few Mann diehards who believe it’s a great movie.

In a new interview with Variety, Mann briefly tackles “Blackhat” and says the responsibility for its failure was his, but that he also thinks the film was ahead of its time:

“It’s my responsibility. The script was not ready to shoot […] The subject may have been ahead of the curve, because there were a number of people who thought this was all fantasy. Wrong. Everything is stone-cold accurate.”

Ok, fair enough. I found the pacing in “Blackhat” to be terribly structured and it didn't develop any of its characters coherently. It used a breakneck pace to tell its story and, in the process, got too convoluted. However, I still haven’t seen the director’s cut, which I hear is an improvement.

Of course, I’ll give the director’s cut a shot very soon, I’ve been meaning to do that for a few years now. But I’m still skeptical that there’s a good movie hidden somewhere in the messy theatrical version that I saw back in early 2015.

Michael Mann is the director of “Manhunter”, “Thief”, “Heat”, “Collateral”, and “The Insider”, he rarely misses, but “Blackhat” was one of the rare critical failures of his career. In 2016, he admitted a sense of dissatisfaction with with the finished film:

 “I wasn’t 100% happy with it,” Mann admitted of the original cut. “It was a challenging film to do because the ambition of the film was to an event driven narrative and develop characters within scenes, but had a very rapid narrative with rhythms imitative of how fast our world moves today in the digital information age. So this is why I intentionally had a rapidly driving plotline.”

For now, Mann has “Ferrari” set to world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in two weeks time. The film stars Penélope Cruz and Adam Driver, it has been a long-gestating passion project of Mann’s for nearly three decades now.