Swordfish (Wide Screen) > Reviews > Pants. Absolute Pants.

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very ordinary
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Standard
Soundtrack	Weak

Advantages:	Not as bad as Battlefield Earth?
Disadvantages:	Brash, noisy, predictable, unoriginal .  .  . shite .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

'Swordfish' opens with John Travolta giving a meaningful monologue about the sorry state of modern movies.
Pah! Coming from the man who gave us 'Battlefield Earth', this is very rich indeed. It wouldn't be so bad if what followed said monologue was actually any good, but it isn't - it's crap.
It's as if he was deliberately opening himself up to attack, as if he knew that every reviewer in the world would pounce on this irony with the glee and relish of a man possessed.
It's as if Travolta was telling the world - "If you think 'Battlefield' was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet" - because 'Swordfish' is a shining example of modern movies at their sorriest.

Okay, perhaps not quite as sorry as the aforementioned cosmic turkey, but still pretty darn sorry. Zero plot, wooden acting, paper thin characters, little or no structure - just an endless parade of high-tech set-pieces, dizzying camerawork and MTV-style, machine-gun editing, all drenched in bright, neon lights and thumping dance music. The net result of which is a film that is all but a distant memory by the time you've reached the cinema car-park. After this two-hour assault on the senses, returning to the real world, with it's drab colours and techno-free soundtrack is something of a relief.

The 'plot' - for want of a better word - is your basic 'bad-guy-trying-to-steal-money' scenario.
Stanley (Hugh Jackman, of X-Men fame) plays a reformed computer hacker who has the requisite know how to steal some nine billion dollars from a long-disused government bank account.
Gabriel (Travolta) wants the money to finance a war against terrorists (but not without staging a little terrorism of his own first), so he sends along the sultry Ginger (Halle Berry) to seduce Stanley into working for him. He agrees to do so in return for ten million dollars, which he intends to use to pay for lawyers in his child custody case (Aww!).
That really is about it, with all of what dramatic tension there is dedicated to the question of whether Gabriel can get away with his robbery or not, and how many policeman he has to shoot, and how many innocent civilians he has to incinerate, and how many buildings he has to blow up, and how many cars he has to crash in order to do it.

Indeed, the scene that really sets the tone in Swordfish comes early on, where Gabriel has rigged the hostages in a bank robbery with explosive collars that will detonate should the hostage go out of range, a la 'The Running Man'. This scenario provides a temptation that Swordfish simply cannot resist and, naturally, one of the hostages (a young woman) goes out of range and is blown to bits, if for no other reason than to satisfy what it percieves to be the bloodlust of the audience. If that wasn't bad enough in itself, the resulting explosion is filmed in a super-slow-motion, 360-degree arc of violence (obviously inspired by The Matrix) that gleefully highlights every piece of flying debris, every pane of breaking glass and every poor soul who happens to get caught in the way. Visually impressive? Yes.. but also deeply unpleasant and totally unnecessary. The use of such shock-tactics so early on leaves a bitter aftertaste that the movie never really recovers from.

The cast do very little to make things better, with Travolta - once again sporting his Pulp Fiction hair-do and a ridiculous goaty beard (presumably to hide the dimple on his chin) - being the worst culprit. He gives a ham-headed performance that is equally as bad, if not worse than that in 'Battlefield Earth', and that really is saying something.

Halle Berry doesn't impress either, happy to be paraded on screen like a piece of meat, she's supposed to at the centre of what passes for a love triangle between Travolta and Jackman, but doesn't have the slightest bit of sexual chemistry with either of them. The film-makers knew this, and in a desperate attempt to try and liven things up they (reportedly) stumped up an extra two million bucks for her to get her norks out, but even this fails to set off any sparks. It's a casual scene, non-sexual and looks exactly like what it is - an afterthought.
Vinnie Jones shows up too, albeit briefly, in his usual hard-guy, henchman role but is given little more to do than look mean occasionally, much the same as he did in director Dominic Sena's previous outing 'Gone in Sixty Seconds'. For the record, I didn't like that either.
The only player that emerges with any credibility is Hugh Jackman. As he hinted at in 'X-Men', Jackman plays the square-jawed, action hero with suitable aplomb, and he does have the screen presense to be a convincing leading man. It's the writers (and I use that term very loosely) behind his character that need locking up. Rather than depict computer hacking for what it is - dull, long-winded and extremely boring - the message here is that hacking is dangerous, exciting and super-cool. Why have a teenage geek plodding away at thousands of lines of boring computer code on a generic, flat-pack desktop, when you can have a hunky, macho-man furiously bashing the keys on a seven-screened eye candy machine, cracking codes as if he were assembling a giant, virtual Rubik's Cube?

This philosophy of "make it look cool" runs throughout the entire movie and very quickly becomes very tiresome.
Why have an ordinary car chase when you can have a bright purple TVR racing around?
Why blow up a person when you can blow up a whole street?
Why roll a bus over when you can dangle one from a helicopter and smash it into a building?
It looks for all the world as if this movie came about after some bright spark had a couple of ideas for scenes that might be interesting, and then built the rest of the movie around them.
And hey! If that doesn't work, we can always get Halle Berry to get her norks out.
What joy!
What entertainment!

What was it again??