Chris Hemsworth is probably best known to most as Thor and based on the box office returns this weekend that’s going to remain the same as not many know took the time to get to know him as James Hunt in Ron Howard‘s Rush. He does have something even more interesting than Thor or even the vastly superior Rush on the horizon, though, and that’s the return of Michael Mann to the director’s chair for Cyber, a film revolving around a U.S.-China task force pursuing a hacker. Hemsworth gave Film Futter a little additional information on the project:
I just finished it. It’s based in the world of cyber terrorism. Basically, something similar to the Chicago Board of Trade is hacked into and it sets off a chain of events around the world, affecting the stock market.
And the code that was used to hack into it, my character had written it years before and he happens to be in prison for cyber crime. He is pulled out and offered a deal if he works with a joint task force of the FBI and the Chinese government in trying to track this guy down.
I can’t say that description doesn’t worry me a little, because it does. The idea of an imprisoned hacker working for the feds typically means either him cutting a deal and the feds ultimately worrying he’ll run whenever he gets the chance or the prospect of him having to use a gun and play action star at some point even though all he is is a lowly computer hacker. Oh, wait, was he working out while he was in the white collar wing at San Quentin? Maybe like Nic Cage in Con Air.
Oh, and this thing better not have a bunch of typing scenes set to techno music. The Fifth Estate gave me enough of that to last me a lifetime. Then again, if we don’t have typing does that mean we need gargoyles and angry demons?
I have a lot of trust in Mann, but he hasn’t directed a film since Public Enemies in 2009 and it isn’t as if that one or Miami Vice before it were, in any way, extraordinary. Cyber is currently slated for a 2014 release, though Warner Bros. hasn’t yet set an official release date.
The film co-stars Viola Davis and William Mapother.
