Sandy Kenyon reviews Chris Hemsworth's 'Blackhat'

NEW YORK (WABC) -- It's a film plot that sounds like it was ripped from the headlines, with villains causing harm not with weapons but through hacking.

The actor who played Thor is not the sort of person who deserves any pity given how good Chris Hemsworth looks, how well he's built and how much charisma he brings to the big screen. Yet I did feel sorry for him, and sorry for Viola Davis, whose formidable talents can not make "Blackhat" worth seeing.

Hemsworth's character is doing hard time for stealing a lot of money, but an FBI team led by Davis needs his help because some bad guy is using the code he wrote to attack a nuclear reactor in China.

The Chinese government reaches out to the US, and a joint team spends the rest of the movie trying to stop the next hack attack.

The dialogue can be hard to understand, and the plot is as muddy as the low-tech way the picture is shot. What begins so promisingly as a thriller with cool effects about the very relevant threat of cyber crime descends into a standard action film.

Hemsworth's character seems more like a trained cop than a world-class hacker, and a romance with one of his colleagues has no heat.

It's a much better investment to spend your money seeing Bradley Cooper as an "American Sniper."

That's a film everyone seems to like, with a poll of moviegoers giving it an average score of an A+ more than for any other movie in recent memory. It's expected to give Clint Eastwood the biggest opening of his career at the box office.