Rating- * * * (3/5)
If you saw this movie, you can appreciate how difficult this review is to write. Swordfish is so varied in quality from one moment to the next, you would think it had multiple directors. There are some scenes that absolutely take your breath away, but there are others that are so purely superficial it’s disgusting. This is yet another heist film but with an interesting mix of computer hacking and terrorists thrown in. But this movie doesn’t really fit into any one genre at all. The story takes several twists and turns but centers around Hugh Jackman, who plays a master hacker recruited by John Travolta to hack into a Swiss bank and make a mighty large transfer. When Jackman decides he might be reluctant to participate, Travolta kidnaps his daughter and his girlfriend, played by Halle Berry. The movie opens with one of the most spectacular explosion shots in movie history. Using bullet-time photography (remember those shots from the Matrix?), the camera sees the first instant of the explosion, and then slows down the action and pans around the frozen explosion, where we can see and hear the hundreds of steel balls packed into the bomb, and once we get to the other side of the explosion, the action speeds back up. The entire movie is worth sitting through just for this one sequence. There are several less than stellar scenes, however, that muddy up the rest of the film. For example, in order to test Jackman’s hacking skills, Travolta holds a gun to his head and tells him to break a code in 60 seconds or else. To add to the difficulty of the task, Jackman is simultaneously receiving some, uh…services from one of Travolta’s girls. The extremes to which the scene is taken are totally unnecessary and add nothing to the sense of urgency we are supposed to feel in the scene. Another example is Halle Berry’s topless scene. While this highly publicized nude scene may have gotten millions of teenage guys into the theatre, but it certainly added nothing to the film and the scene looks remarkably out of place in the context of the film. In these respects, the movie clearly started out as a pretty good film but may have gotten screwed up by the studios when they realized that they could pay their bills with this screenplay. The final scene involves a harrowing chase sequence with a bus being picked up and flown around by a helicopter. The shots immediately following this scene create a twist so bizarre and confusing that I actually turned around to the strangers behind me in the theater to ask them if they understood what happened. They did not and I only did after viewing the DVD and listening to some commentary. Regardless of the ending, this is a pretty good action movie and has a rather interesting plot line, at least while you can follow it. I will also give it that it contains possibly the greatest explosion shot in motion picture history, and for this alone, I will give it a “see it” recommendation.