I just moved to Seattle recently and in the process of looking around town for work have managed to catch a few movies in the theaters. Based on a decent looking trailer and the fact that I enjoyed watching Hugh Jackman in the last flick he was in, I decided to check out Swordfish on opening afternoon (matinees are much cheaper and less prone to being sold out). Well, I wasn't too impressed with it.

The film tries to be edgy by tweaking its narration techniques and begins with a bit of a bang. It doesn't really go too far downhill from there but it is a steady coast (or glide perhaps?) that sure didn't suit my fancy. The plot opening is a little more complicated than I am going to make it out to be (it starts out at a climactic point and then shifts back in time) but for the sake of coherency...

Hugh Jackman plays Stanley Jobson, an ex-hacker who is out on his luck due to a difference of opinion between himself and the Federal government (and he was thrown in jail for two years because of it). He has been working at low-paying jobs and is banned from even touching a computer when a mysterious lady named Ginger (Halle Berry) shows up with an offer he can't refuse. He will be given enough money to gain custody of his daughter from his ex-wife and her new boyfriend (who produces porn films) in exchange for his services. To whet his appetite, he is offered 100 thousand just for showing up for a meeting.

He shows up to the meeting. He is 'interviewed' for the job. Complications ensue.


This film falls into hacker/tech-thriller genre that is slowly getting a bit more common. This is the same sort of film that sports such titles as War Games and more recently Hackers and The Net. The difference is that this particular film is trying to do it in a 'cool' manner (yeah Hackers did try that but...). I have heard people compare this film against Pulp Fiction. Personally I think it lacks in comparison (even though I didn't really care for PF). It does sport a few techniques in cinematography were pretty dang neat though and the plot is a bit skewed by...

Well... Hmm... I better wait until the end of the review to tell you that. Spoiler alert prewarning here (I will give you another before I actually write stuff).

Anyhow, Hugh Jackman does a passable job as the protagonist of the film but doesn't show too much of a range of acting. I would have to give him the benefit of the doubt here though because the film generally seems more of a John Travolta fest. Jackman doesn't get to show much of his Wolverine dangerous side that he showed in last year's X-Men. It does surface in small bits but overall his role is more of a spectator in the film and his personality doesn't seem suited to this role. As a computer hacker-for-hire, he is on the defensive for much of the film and he doesn't really play desperation as well as other actors (I am thinking of Harrison Ford as an example here). When he is allowed a word in edgewise, he does a decent job but the dialogue isn't geared for him. Instead...

Jackman is overshadowed by John Travolta's role as the bad guy. Travolta plays Gabriel Shear, a criminal mastermind who has spearheaded an insidious plot to steal lots of money from the United States government. Travolta hams the part up and generally overshadows all of his fellow actors with his 'witty' dialogue. Personally I didn't really find any of it terribly witty (though a reference to Dog Day Afternoon at the beginning of the film elicited a little thought) and it got on my nerves in fairly short order. Travolta needs to learn to work more with his costars instead of working against them. I have heard him quoted as liking roles as bad guys but dialogue only really works when it is dialogue and not a monologue and Travolta's ego seems to be unable to get the hint from the last film I saw him in (last year's Battlefield Earth). Anyhow, if you like Travolta, you might like this aspect of the film. I can stand a bit of him and thought the dialogue in Pulp Fiction was decent but here it just doesn't work. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Travolta had a major hand in the dialogue in this particular film (in fact I would bet on it).

Halle Berry is beautiful. Not sure about her acting skills though. She doesn't really get a whole lot of a chance to display them here either (oddly enough, perhaps she got a bit more of a chance than Jackman though). She does manage to display a whole lot of skin though and looks great in doing so. I have heard rumors that she was paid a half of a million dollars to appear topless. I can't really complain about that except that her part in the film was a bit too shallow for my tastes.

The pacing in the film is downright goofy. Basically it gives great big burst of creative energy at the start and then tries to draft on it all of the way until the end of the film. The humor is sporadic (I didn't find it humorous but I gathered it was sporadic by the guffaws from half a dozen people in the packed theaters), the attitude is blase tinged with near-coolness (Jackman has some definite potential if he were allowed a script that actually played to his strength), and the tech-jargon is meaningless half the time.

I guess I should go into the tech-jargon a bit more. Swordfish actually has an interesting vibe going with regards to tech. It doesn't act like it is terribly special but instead treats tech like you are inside the hacking world. They do this by not hyping up the tech-jargon too much in many parts of the film. Unfortunately they don't stray too far from it though and do go into some elementary techie (oooooh, 16-bit encryption or oOoOoOo 128-bit encryption!). Also unfortunately, they get a bit inane. In one scene Jackman approaches a computer in a state of awe (presumably because it is so dang state-of-the-art) because it has a bank of monitors displaying an alternating image flashing from monitor to monitor. Personally I almost laughed at this unintentional error. A real hacker wouldn't respect a computer until after he found out what it could do. Flashy, coolio images or not.

Basically this film attempts to put a trendy new slant on the hacker legend in cinema and presents it in a chrome-coated exterior with an inch-deep swimming pool of somewhat snazzy dialogue. Travolta fans will eat it up. Jackman fans will agonize a bit but might find it passable. Those that think Halle Berry is terribly gorgeous will oggle. The rest of us will find it somewhat tedious.



SPOILER ALERT.


Told you I would warn you.

A big reason that I found the movie tedious (to tell you the truth I was rather impressed by Jackman in The X-Men) was because they put the big climax at the end of the first scene!

Seriously.

Now this makes for an interesting opening to the film (complete with bullettime stop-motion photography) but gosh it sure doesn't help my digestion of the piece. After the first scene, it pushes us back a few days into the past... To be fair it isn't exactly the climax but it is probably one of the more interesting scenes in the film. No I am not going to tell you what it is but if it were put into its proper place on the timeline of the film, it would be located right before the big showdown. The big showdown by the way is a big letdown and it was pretty predictable to boot. When a person can find what is ostensibly a chase scene involving a flying (literally) bus boring then you know something is wrong with the film! The cinematography after the first scene varies from annoyingly normal to somewhat botched. When I could have been on the edge of my seat at the end of the film wondering about the fate of hostages, the cameras were too close or it was just the wrong shot. The viewers don't get to know most of the hostages so we don't empathize with them like we should (aside from the opening which teases you into thinking that you might be given more details later that never actually come out) and so the film just gets annoying, including the actual ending which I predicted pretty early on and didn't surprise me much at all (it is supposed to).

I did like about three of the scenes in the film though. The opening (which I just mentioned), Jackman's recruitment (I won't ruin that by telling more than the trailers tell but it is a bit on the sleezy/tacky side), and Halle Berry looks great (ok, that isn't technically a scene because she looks great in several scenes but after her topless scene there was nothing to really keep me involved in the film).

Anyhow, sorry about the spoiler. I just had to get that off of my chest.

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age