In the light of the recent hacker attacks, and all the fuss about Megaupload, Swordfish comes as a logical choice for viewing. And you can be reading this ten years later and those hacker attacks we’ll still be in the news. Coming to us from Skip Woods, writer of Thursday, and Dominic Sena, director of Gone in Sixty Seconds, you know what to expect from Swordfish. A nicely paced action movie with a great cast and an interesting story. A story that features elements that were hard to swallow in 2001 but now are taken as a commonplace truth.
Right from the beginning, with one of the most awesome explosions ever created, Swordfish shows us what we are in for. I mean they used 135 synchronized still cameras to shoot it! It is the most complicated visual effect in Warner Brothers’ history. The entire movie looks fucking great with saturated colors and stylish cinematography. The story reminded me of Will Smith’s Enemy of the State released just three years earlier.
Do not be alarmed by the all tech lingo they’re going to throw at you in the first half hour. This is the movie where Halle Berry famously undressed for the first time in front of the camera. You go, girl! And with a hunk like Jackman, we got something for everybody.
There a lot of clichés, but they fit in nicely with the rest of the story. So you can just relax, enjoy the action (and tits), and your selected beverage (I recommend beer). All the three leads were great. John Travolta proved over and over again that he is great as the creepy villain (I think that all the actors that wanna play bad guys should convert to Scientology), young Hugh Jackman was too cool and slick as a rogue hacker and what to say about mega-hot Halle Berry besides that she is a true eye-candy…
Stanley Jobson is a hacker who got out of jail recently and now living in the middle of nowhere. He is forbidden to touch a computer, let alone work on it. And his ex-wife is now married to a porn king shooting movies out of her apartment. This is surely not a good environment for his daughter, and with that in mind Stanley accepts the offer of a mysterious woman called Ginger. Hoping that he will get the custody of his daughter he agrees to meet a flamboyant millionaire Gabriel Shear. After his guard put a gun to his head, and a prostitute started giving him head Gabriel Shear ordered him to hack into a Department of Defense. That’s the time when he realized that he got himself in quite a pickle…
Shot at the turn of the century, Swordfish has all the best stuff from both decades. We have a crazy story about an anti-terrorist terrorist with a lot of stunts from the nineties. The car chases are not just car chases, as they are also full of intense shootouts. The sleek visuals and the background of the story that will eventually prove to be prophetic are what the 00s brought to the table. I think that Travolta’s From Paris With Love was a fun throwback to this now-lost genre. So, if you’re up for some mindless entertainment check out Swordfish, it will not disappoint.
Director: Dominic Sena
Cast: John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Sam Shepard, Vinnie Jones
Fun Facts: Thomas Jefferson did NOT shoot a man on the White house lawn for treason.
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IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
