96 – Swordfish

The term “no-brainer” usually refers to a decision so simple that any fool can make it correctly. It’s also applicable to this movie, as one is probably better off not having a brain when watching it – or, if one is in possession of a brain, it’ll be all mushy and spongy afterwards.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Swordfish is profoundly stupid, with profoundly stupid characters doing profoundly stupid things. It’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence. While you watch it, your brain turns to jello. Now, granted, this happens with a lot of current action movies, but this one sinks so quickly and so authoritatively into the great abyss of suckitude that you can hardly pause to catch your breath. Oh, but wait – it’s not so exciting that you actually lose your breath.

Gabriel Shear (John Travolta, sporting yet another goofy hairdo), is a megalomaniacal hacker with oodles of cash. He’s reclusive but dangerous; he hires world-famous hackers to break into bank accounts and steal money electronically. He’s ruthless, too, caring more about his single goal (which is thankfully revealed midway through the movie) than about other people’s lives, no matter how many are lost.

Shear picks up ex-hacker Stanley (Hugh Jackman), who went to prison for hacking into the FBI and setting back their computer system two years. Stanley’s forbidden from seeing his evercute daughter by his trailer-trash, porn-star ex-wife, and he lacks the cash to fight the custody in court. Can you see where this is leading?

Shear sends one of his top lieutenants, Ginger (Halle Berry) to pick up Stanley, and she convinces him to sign on. It’s a simple gig – he gets $100,000 just for meeting Gabriel, and he can walk away if he doesn’t like the deal he’ll be offered. Right. Like anyone in a movie like this would say no to that. If Stanley were really bright, he’d sense right off that Gabriel is a Bad Guy – people don’t just give $100,000 away for a meeting, you know. But Stanley’s not too swift, so he goes along. Presumably he also goes because Halle Berry asked him nicely.

At any rate, Stanley accepts the cash to go visit Shear, who needs someone to break an encrypted network in 60 seconds. I’m not going to bog down this review with technical lingo about how Stanley accomplishes it, mainly because I have no idea. The way hacking is almost always portrayed on the silver screen is by having one disheveled (usually young, although Stanley’s in his early to mid-thirties) hacker type really, really, really fast, hitting a million keys in about 15 seconds, then dramatically hitting “enter” and looking triumphant. So Stanley has to pull off this kind of feat, under enormous pressure (in more ways than one).

Now, by this point you’re supposed to be sympathizing with Stanley. He’s the good guy, right? He’s doing this against his will, right? And he only wants to see his daughter, right? The screenwriters don’t leave much out when making Stanley out to be a solid Good Guy. Heck, the only reason he cracked the FBI computer was out of a sense of goodwill. So he’s a hacker with a cause, some morals, and a slight sense of purpose.

Ordinarily, you’d think a movie about hacking into computers would be dull – and it would be if all we had to look at was a computer screen. So Shear crashes some cars, takes hostages, comandeers a bus and a helicopter, and do on. It’s kind of like Speed, but not ON speed, if you catch my drift. There’s only so many of the same old crashes and smashes before the old consciousness decides to take an extended nap.

On the video and DVD boxes for Swordfish, there’s a warning about the violent content. The warning notes that the movie was made before September 11, 2001 and that there are some scenes in the movie that might be unsettling for some people. I’ll save you the trouble – those scenes are when Gabriel acts like a terrorist overtly, rather than just subtlely, and while it is possible people who lost loved ones on September 11 might feel a little uneasy with them, I think they’d react more strongly to the
mind-numbing stupidity of the entire movie. Why focus on just a couple of scenes when the whole thing is like a giant drone bee, buzzing endlessly and saying nothing?

A quick look at the cast. The good guys look good, the bad guys look bad. Ginger’s on the fence – is she good? Is she bad? Is she both? Do we care? Halle Berry hasn’t had a good role in a few years, but this one should have been easy for her. It just seems to me that the sole reason for having her there was for her to look pretty. She’s not bad at that – and even does a gratuitous topless scene – but lends little in the way of substance to a movie that was already sorely lacking it.

Parents: There’s a lot of violence in the movie, and although most of it is cartoonish, some of it might hit too close to home. Most adults can see through violence in movies with no problem, separating it from reality, but kids don’t always have that ability.

Swordfish: 4