Swordfish opens in a highly promising manner, with John Travolta
holding forth in a Tarantinoesque rant about Hollywood convention and Dog Day
Afternoon. From there it launches into a tour de force suspense sequence
culminating in some house-rattling sound effects. Unfortunately, everything goes
badly downhill from there as it turns into an absurd computer thriller that is
distasteful on just about every level.
Hugh Jackman stars as Stanley Jobson, a convicted hacker who is under court
order to stay away from computers and from his daughter Holly (Camryn
Grimes).
But vixen Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) shows up at his Texas trailer one
day and tempts him back into hacking with both money and access to his daughter.
Bringing Stan to Los Angeles, Ginger hands him off to Gabriel Shear (Travolta),
who has an elaborate scheme to steal nearly ten billion dollars in order to
fight a war on terror. Stan must walk a tightrope between his own incrimination
and finding a way to get his daughter back, as he becomes increasingly appalled
at Gabriel's methods. Part of the problem with the picture is that its
2001 mindset is thoroughly neoconservative in nature: it is focused entirely on
the notion of terrorist states, rather than terrorist criminal organizations.
More disturbing, it has a deep affection for an end-justifies-the-means approach
to terrorism, including theft, kidnapping, murder, political assassination, and,
ironically, enough outright terrorism as all entirely acceptable means of
combating terrorism. In a world where selling arms to actual enemy states and
running cocaine in order to raise funds to overthrow other inconvenient
governments is considered patriotism, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
Berry is here just as eye candy, spending a fair amount of time in
lingerie and with a notorious topless scene that is not in the least sexy and
hardly worth the attention it received at the time. But somehow it's fitting;
the film appeals to the lurid at every turn (though it hypocritically gets
moralistic and tut-tuts about the evils of pornography, despite everything else
that it endorses) while never quite delivering.
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