Swordfish (2001)

From the producers of The Matrix comes Swordfish, the thrilling tale of an attempt to hack into and steal a long-forgotten cache of government money. John Travolta leads the cast as the just-crazy-enough ringleader of the group, with sidekick Halle Berry, and Hugh Jackman as the convicted hacker who's just looking for a way to rescue his daughter from the sinister clutches of his ex-wife and her porn-producing husband.

Travolta fans can rejoice: he has definitely returned from the brink of disaster that he so carelessly flirted with in making Battlefield: Earth. Swordfish isn't perfect, but it's a helluva solid action movie whose opening sequence features what could possibly be the greatest ten seconds in the history of cinematography. Picture the 360 degree rotation scenes of the Matrix. But instead of encircling a single kung-fu move, the shot depicts the effect of a massive explosion on an entire intersection of the city. Absolutely unbelieveable, and literally breathtaking.

As I said, it's not quite perfect. The opening sequence is great for drawing the audience into the movie, but then the film jumps back several days in time, and on more than one occasion I felt like my knowledge of the future cheated me out of part of the suspense of later scenes. A chronological presentation may have been more effective.

Also, as one who works in the computer industry, I must say I was thoroughly unimpressed by the scenes of "hacking" in the movie. It consisted mostly of throwing around just enough buzzwords to make the audience think something of substance is being said, combined with the rather standard Hollywood depiction of computers as having tricked-out graphic interfaces dedicated to modelling the most mundane of tasks (see Jurassic Park and Independence Day). But then I remind myself that this isn't a computer movie; it's an action movie. Nobody wants to sit around watching Hugh Jackman type away at some blinking UNIX prompt, so I suppose I can forgive the glossy veneer. And in some ways, the film makes very effective use of Hitchcock's concept of the "McGuffin": a section of the plot that remains undescribed because its details are absolutely immaterial to the story (for example, a quest to retrieve secret documents. What's in the documents? Um, I dunno, spy stuff. Who cares?).

The rest of the action scenes aren't quite on par with benchmarks like Face/Off or the latest Bond movies, but they're very good in their own right and inspire more than a few "whoa!" 's. They advance the story extremely well with only a spot or two of predictability, but the great thing about this movie is that even when you think you've got it figured out, they'll throw one more curveball that you didn't see coming.

Overall, while Swordfish isn't as thought-provoking as the Matrix nor as beautifully choreographed as Face/Off, it will nonetheless stand as an extremely solid and unconventional action flick.