SEE Magazine
Issue #393: June 14, 2001
Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved

On Screen REVIEW by Stephen Notley Swordfish starring Halle Berry’s breasts now playing Cineplex Odeon ** (out of five) Apparently the big thing about Swordfish is the fact that the producers coughed up an extra $500,000 to get Halle Berry to show us her breasts. And, 40 or so minutes in, she does, briefly and in a relatively unsexy way. Now, not to use the word "gratuitous" too freely here or anything, but there was just no point. She might as well have been wearing a bikini. Not to condemn her breasts, of course, not at all. Quite the opposite. They’re good, round, naked – quality boobs, to be sure. But for this we’re supposed to pay 10, 11 bucks when Shrek and Moulin Rouge are playing in the same theatre? The first image we see is John Travolta staring right at us and saying "Movies are shit." This sounds suspiciously like a dare. Cuz, don’t forget, there’s a computer-hacker spy-action movie in there as well. It’s, um, okay. Like most brainless action movies these days, Swordfish is a big shmozzle of competing loud elements that don’t fit together in any particular way. John Travolta is one of those big elements, once again playing one of his trademark flamboyant grinning bad guys. In the John Travolta pantheon of big bombastic bad guys, his "Gabriel" ranks a little bit below Castor Troy in Face/Off and way, way below Terl from Battlefield Earth. Another element is the "hacking" stuff, which shows that Hollywood is still clumsily grappling with the problem of making computer activities seem energetic and exciting. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine from X-Men) plays the computer hacker expert who gets dragged in to do some surprisingly incidental hacking. This consists of some rotating cubes on the computer screen and Wolverine going "Yeah!" and "Whoo!" and like that. Wolverine looks like a good actor, but he’s the most un-hacker-guy hacker guy in a movie for a long time. How many hacker guys work out 15 hours a day and fire golf balls off the top of their rusty trailers? And don’t drink Big Gulps while they program? Not too many. The plot, of course, crumbles away as you look at it. Travolta’s some evil guy who wants to steal a bunch of money and be a terrorist to scare the terrorists away from America or something. For all its faux-seriousness and hard-nosedness and hip self-awareness (can’t get enough!), it’s just as lame-brained as anything else out there. Everybody’s got some twisty secret, but none of it really says or means anything. However, stuff sure blows up. For example, the most gratuituosly overdone extendo-Matrix shot that swirls through half a block of time-frozen just-exploded mayhem. That’s in there. Lots of cars blowing up. Travolta shoots a fair number of people, I think. Lotta rotating cubes. And a pretty big action sequence at the end. All rather pointless and trivial, though, and the extra sadism and vulgarity added for this to qualify as a "grown-up" action movie leaves a slightly nasty aftertaste . There must be a better movie to see than this one.

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