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Log on to Swordfish

by Spencer Ross

I must admit, I was rather intrigued by Swordfish from the beginning.  Starring John Travolta as Gabriel Shear, I had originally seen the trailer with him shooting down cars, and a Matrix-like scene brought to us by Matrix producer Joel Silver.  With other summer movies out that I wanted to see though, I wasn't sure if it was the one I truly wanted to see first.  Even my initial review was somewhere in between 3 1/2 and 4 stars, but the more I think about it, the more I'd bump it up to the 4 stars.  Swordfish definitely was slightly more than just your average computer hacker movie and ended with a slight twist in plot that separated it from a disneyfied ending but not that same drastic twist as in say, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, American Beauty, or Fight Club.

The beginning of Swordfish starts off with Gabriel Shear talking to the camera about atypical hollywood endings; how different endings might have come about to some of his favourite movies.  From there, he takes out of the building, and after police fail to comply, one of several hostages that is strapped with 20 lbs of C-4 explosive and ball bearings (thus becoming a claymore mine), is detonated along with the policeman.  Borrowing from the bulletvision of the Matrix, the explosion is shown in 360 along with all the damage it creates.  A magnificent shot.  From there, we also see our "hero" Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman of X-Men).  Now what really blew my mind was that this was one of those "Four days earlier..." types of movies, cause that starts to throw you off again at the end. 

From there, the story deals with various themes.  First, there is Stanley, who wants nothing more but to see his daughter, who is no longer allowed to see him since Stanley was thrown in jail for computer charges (Stanley is the number one hacker in the world).  Stanley is sought out for Gabriel Shear by Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry), who is also a DEA spy.  Shear tempts Stanley with seeing his daughter again and 10 million dollars if Stanley can come up with a way to extract 9.4 billion dollars of untapped government money without getting caught.  In a literally balls-out scene, Shear tests Stanley's skills by having  Stanley hack into the DoD database in 60 seconds---while, having a gun to his head, and while getting a blow job at the same time.  "The best hackers in the world can do this in 60 minutes, you've got 60 seconds," Shear instructs.

The rest of the plot focuses on Shear's plan to get the money (not just a simple bank robbery, but a plan to get funds for  personal retribution against international terrorists), Don Cheadle's Agent D.A. Roberts searching for Shear and Stanley, and Stanley's quest to get to see his daughter.  There's a lot of cyberbabble, but its understandable fits the plot, and unlike hacker movies, the computers are center to the human aspects of the plot.  At the end, the movie comes back to the beginning and follows where the beginning left off though not without giving the viewer the ending Shear talks about in the first shots of the movie.  Using "misdirection" Shear gets off scot-free, Stanley gets to see his girl, and the rest is all due to Shear's own trickery.  When I realize how much the ending actually was well written, it makes everything else make sense.

Swordfish is a fun movie and one to see.  The directing is well done, the screenplay is slighty over mainstream's disney head, and the music by Paul Oakenfeld definitely sets the pace of the movie.  Is it grade A?  No.  Will you be entertained? Yes.

21/6/01