Swordfish

Swordfish has already achieved a degree of notoriety as the movie where they paid Halle Berry half a million dollars to take off her shirt — and in the end that may be the most notable thing about it. For the record, I can now safely attest to the fact that Ms. Berry has breasts. Whether or not they’re worth $500,000 to see — especially in a shot that lasts maybe 20 seconds — is another matter. Unfortunately, this leaves us with around 98 minutes of movie to fill up in some other manner, and that manner can best be described as superficially efficient. The film delivers the requisite thrills and chases and explosions, and some of these are admittedly done in the same high style that director Dominic Sena brought to his better music videos. The problem is, they ultimately become downright dull in their predictability. The options to these shots, however, are scenes of super hacker Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman, Someone Like You) being forced by mysterious super criminal Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) to labor away at a computer keyboard — something not exactly brimming with inherent cinematic possibilities, even if the goal is scoring $9.5 billion. Recognizing this obvious limitation, Sena and screenwriter Skip Ward tend to put poor Stanley into the most improbably awkward situations while he plies his trade on the alphabet piano. The film’s trailer offers some clue about this in a supposedly tense scene where Stanley has 60 seconds to hack into the Department of Defense computer system with a gun to his head (only half of his very R-rated predicament). The old 60-second gambit resurfaces to goose the action late in the film where Stanley hacks away in order to save semi-love interest Ginger’s (Berry) life while she dangles from a noose. As absurd as this sounds, it plays even worse. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it takes a heart of stone to watch lame insert shots of Halle Berry’s impression of someone choking and not burst out laughing. The truly unfortunate thing about Swordfish is that it actually starts out very promisingly, with John Travolta delivering an intriguing ersatz-Tarantino discourse on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon — assessing it as a great film, “clearly Lumet’s best,” but ultimately unrealistic. Travolta — in the only scene in the film where he acts rather than blusters — is the ultimate film fan here, and it’s the movie’s one truly successful example of the kind of cinematic sleight of the hand it attempts to trade in. His largely indigestible analysis of Dog Day Afternoon leads the viewer neatly down the garden path, but offers even more, since his off-center reading of the film is finally revealed as utterly personal and boasts the single worthwhile insight into his character Swordfish offers. When the scene expands to reveal what is actually going on, the film not only retains its cool, but erupts into a genuinely exciting action sequence that carries the film along up to the title, “Four days earlier.” At that point, Swordfish starts unraveling in its unceasing procession of the preposterous. There’s little point in cataloguing the film’s lapses of logic and plot holes, since Swordfish’s very existence is predicated on nothing more than this or that next Big Effect: a car chase, a shoot-out, Halle Berry in her Victoria’s Secret best, another shoot-out, Halle Berry’s breasts, the much-promoted bus sequence, and so on. It’s that kind of movie. Witless and charmless, Swordfish is strictly for fans of guns, car chases and explosions.