Django Wexler

This is an attempt to reconstruct the script of the movie BLACKHATS, which I watched on the plane ride home and was completely baffling in its badness. I rented it for $6 and there’s an hour of the flight left, so I may as well use it to entertain myself.

CHINESE NUCLEAR REACTOR

Everything is fine. Suddenly, COMPUTERS! We zoom inside the computer to see a light turn on. Then everything is NOT FINE. A water pump breaks, and the reactor almost immediately explodes, because that is how reactors work.

CHINESE BOSS meets with CHINESE COP.

CB: Can you find out who did this?
CC: Only with the help of the Americans. They still have the … code of the … virus? Or something. Ours got exploded in the reactor.
CB: Fine, I’ll have to convince the FBI.

FBI WOMAN meets with FBI BOSS.

FW: I think we should work with them.
FB: Work with the Chinese? Never! *pause* Okay, fine.

Meanwhile, THOR is in prison. He gets called into the prison warden’s office to get yelled at for hacking into the prison commissary with a phone or something. The point is, we know he’s a HACKER, and he mouths off to the warden so we know he’s COOL. He also does some push-ups so we know he’s BUFF.

Meanwhile, at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, HACKERS once again zoom the camera inside a computer and do something with LIGHTS. This causes a catastrophic rise in the price of soy. (Seriously that’s what happens.)

Meanwhile, CHINESE COP meets with his sister, GIRL.

CC: I need you to come with me to America. You are an elite network administrator, and I need one of those I can trust.
Girl: No. On second thought, fine. Does the fact that I’m an elite system administrator mean I get to do computer stuff in this movie?
CC: No, you basically read stuff off screens to us.
Girl: Dang.

They go to NON-SPECIFIC AMERICA and meet up with FBI WOMAN and her partner FBI JERK.

CC: I will immediately establish good relations by telling you how much your technical people suck.
FW: I don’t really even argue with this.
CC: We need my old college roommate Thor.

THOR gets offered a deal to get out of prison, but he negotiates it to a better deal so we can see how COOL he is.

CC: Hey bro, good to see you!
Thor: Your Earth prison could never hold me! I mean, hi bro. Sorry, I’ve been doing so much of this Avengers shit it slips sometimes.
CC: This is my sister Girl!
*THOR and the CAMERAMAN both stare pervily.*

They go to the Chicago computer center and THOR shows up the pencil-necked dweeb who works there by typing on a command line, because he is a HACKER. He runs .exe files on UNIX because that is a thing that happens.

FW: Okay, so this dude planted the virus here. Let’s all go find him.
Thor: Why don’t Girl and I go by ourselves, and you two stay here? Because … reasons. Something about grids.
FW: I don’t trust you so I’m sending FBI Jerk along. Try not to evade him so effortlessly the movie won’t even show us how you do it.

He DOES. The guy they went to find is dead, but he was meeting another guy at a Korean restaurant, so they go there. Nobody shows up. Thor finds a camera and concludes that it’s a trap, and then every Korean in the restaurant inexplicably tries to murder them, including the chef. They escape.

Girl: You are awful good at hand to hand combat for a hacker.
Thor: Verily, none shall stand before the might of Mjolnir!
Girl: But since this was a dead end and we learned nothing, this whole part of the movie is pointless.
Thor: We had better have sex then.
Girl: Why? The movie has made no effort to establish any romantic feeling between us, other than you staring at me like a creep.
Thor: I DO look like Thor, though.
Girl: Point.

They have that weird PG-13 sex where you don’t actually take any clothes off, but wake up later naked under a sheet.

Meanwhile, the competent characters blackmail the representative of the Exchange into revealing his client records, because this is something we are totally comfortable with the FBI doing. They discover that some money from the soy bubble went to China, which is a small place completely accessible by a few minutes’ car ride from Hong Kong.

Everyone meets up in China, and they find the three guys who took the money. Thor discovers they’re being sent their instructions by EVIL FOREIGN MAN, who sits in a cafe texting to nobody all day long while the Chinese police watch.

FW: Wait, you guys are actually watching him already, but you don’t have the content of his texts?
CC: Unlike America China is big on civil liberties.

They try to arrest EVIL FOREIGN MAN, but he produces an army of gun toting thugs out of his back pocket. Chinese police charge in and die horribly in huge numbers. Thor turns out to be pretty good in a gunfight, too. Eventually EVIL FOREIGN MAN kills all the police and escapes in broad daylight, because China is a DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE apparently.

Thor: Dang. Once again we are completely foiled and useless.
CC: We actually sort of suck at our jobs. By the way, are you banging my sister?
Thor: Verily.
CC: Right on, bro.
FW: This movie could pass the Bechdel Test if Girl and I exchanged a line, but we won’t.

The Chinese police arrive to say that the reactor is now “under control” so they can go in and retrieve the hard drives of the hacked computers, which may yield a clue. CHINESE COP, THOR, and GIRL do this instead of trained nuclear technicians. It looks like they might pass out and die, but then they don’t.

Thor: The data is on here, but it’s too badly corrupted to use!
CC: We pulled a hard drive from inside a breached nuclear reactor, I’m amazed it still works at all.
Thor: FBI Woman, when you arrested me, you restored my corrupt data somehow.
FW: The NSA has a program called Black Widow that can do that. They let us use it in a high profile case like yours. Now, though, this case that involves nuclear terrorism and the all important soy market apparently isn’t good enough.
Thor: I will break into the NSA by the power of HACKING!

Shockingly, this invokes something semi-plausible (if you squint real hard), rather than just typing really fast. They get the data and find out that the bad guy is using a service that hosts black hat hackers in Jakarta.

FW: Wait, if there’s a service like that, shouldn’t we, the FBI, know about it already?
Thor: Unlike the NSA, this Indonesian ISP is impenetrable to HACKING. We’ll have to physically break in there and grab stuff.
CHINESE BOSS: Not so fast! The NSA called and said they know you hacked them. Chinese Cop, turn Thor over to the Americans!
CC: Right away, sir, let me definitely not go warn him.

He DOES. Thor and Girl escape.

Thor: How did they detect my HACKING?!
Girl: Uh, you called them and asked for something, and when they said no it was stolen literally minutes later. It doesn’t take a genius.

Thor, Girl, and Chinese Cop meet up.

CC: Now that you’re a fugitive, we’ll have to sneak you into Indonesia, Thor. Girl, you have to stay here, because this is suddenly too dangerous.
Thor: That’s right. This isn’t like walking into a nuclear reactor, this is serious.
Girl: You guys suck.
Thor: You don’t want to date me anyway. I’m on the run from the law now.
Girl: Fine, but let’s make out one last time.

They do. Suddenly EVIL FOREIGN MAN shows up and destroys the car Chinese Cop is in with a bazooka!

Thor: Brooooooo!

FBI WOMAN and FBI JERK have been following Thor. They talk a bit about her dead husband, who was killed in 9/11.

FW: Wait, does that count as talking about my family? Did that raise my death flag? Son of a BITCH!

They show up where the gun toting thugs are trying to kill Thor. The FBI agents IMMEDIATELY open fire, and and killed by the bad guys. (I can’t stress enough that their procedure is: drive down the street in a foreign country, see gunfire on the road ahead, start firing guns out the car window without trying to find out what’s going on.). Thor and Girl escape, again in broad daylight, because again, DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE. They procure fake documents and exit from the country within literally minutes, because ditto.

Girl: I got the bad guy’s account file somehow, and it lists that he ordered satellite photos of this spot in Malaysia. Let’s go check it out!
Thor: You didn’t hack him, did you? Because HACKING is my job.

In Malaysia, they discover a deserted dam with water pumps of the same brand as used in the nuclear reactor.

Thor: That’s it! The reactor was PRACTICE! The bad guy’s real plan is to destroy this damn, flooding the tin mines in this valley, thus causing an increase in the price of tin while buying tin ore futures!
Girl: That’s seriously the big twist? The bad guys are manipulating the tin futures market, with the money they made on a soy bubble? Is the goal to make their plot so boring that no action hero will come foil it? Not to mention that makes no sense, since destroying a reactor would draw huge attention. This dam is completely unguarded, he could just WALK here and destroy it with a hammer! And–
Thor: I summon BIFROST to transport us to Jakarta!

They break into the top secret ISP by dropping a truck through the roof of the building, then just sauntering in with the cops, once again demonstrating no regard whatsoever for bystanders’ safety. Once they have the data, they steal the soy money, and call the bad guys.

EFM: Who is this?
Thor: Seriously, what accent are you even trying for? Let me talk to your boss.
EFM: Never. Well, fine.
BAD GUY: I am of course vaguely British, unlike my mostly ethnic henchmen. You’ve got my money, what do you want?
Thor: I want a cut of your scheme.
BG: Wait, so you’re holding my money hostage in exchange for more money? How does that make sense?
Thor: Your Earth numbers confuse and anger me.
BG: Interesting. Okay, but I demand a personal meeting, even though that can serve no possible purpose other than for us to try to kill each other.

Thor schedules the meeting in a big public square, thus deliberately starting a gunfight in a dense crowd. He prepares with a screwdriver up his sleeve and makeshift body armor made from magazines.

EFM: I will frisk you, rather than shooting you on sight, although killing you is clearly the plan.
Thor: Thanks! I’ll stab you in the face with this screwdriver and take your gun.
BG: Thugs, kill him!

They shoot lots of random civilians, but Thor is impervious to bullets due to his magazine armor. He kills the thugs. BAD GUY, a fat, pasty British hacker, pulls a knife and attempts to engage THOR in hand to hand combat. Thor stabs him about a million times immediately.

Thor: That’s what you get for HACKING when you’re not COOL.
Girl: I love you! For some reason!
Thor: Abs, I assume.
Girl: But aren’t we still on the run from the FBI? Won’t they easily find the money? For that matter, how are we going to get out of Indonesia after starting a gunfight in public?
Thor: Easily.

Indonesia also being a DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE, they do.