Swordfish

“Swordfish,” the new techno-thriller starring John Travolta and directed by Dominic Sena, is as slick as a greased griddle, and about as meaningful. Penned by someone named Skip Woods, the picture wants to be sophisticated and cynical but winds up confused and self important. It is as if Woods thought all those James Bond pictures were excellent paradigms, not realizing that they have long since passed over into self parody. Though it has its moments, “Swordfish” is regrettably lacking in humor. Travolta plays Gabriel Shear, an international... something. We are never quite sure what he is, except that he is a crook, and apparently very rich. In fact, as a soon to be dead flunky tells the FBI, he lives “in a world beyond your world,” which, as the movie has it, seems to mean that he keeps a lot of pretty girls and fast cars around. Shear is a man who gets what he wants, and what he wants now is for Stanley Jobson, the world’s best computer hacker, to do a job for him.

Stanley is played by Hugh Jackman (“X-Men,” “ Someone Like You”), and he must also be the world’s best looking hacker (seriously, all the geeks here look like B-list runway models from some Milan fashion show; whatever happened to the pasty faced gawks of Seattle?). Stanley walks around with a 3-day stubble (isn’t that so over, by the way?), and a permanent scowl, and we are supposed to feel sorry for him because he can’t see his daughter, whom he loves more than anything, I tell you! Stanley can’t see his daughter because he was in jail for hacking, though it seems to be OK for the little girl to live with her porn star mother and porn king stepdad. Someone had better tell Jackman to wake up, though, or he will be on the fast track to next year’s Hollywood trivia quiz show. Admittedly he is saddled with a weak script, but he seems incapable of making his character come to life at all. The cast is also saddled with Sena, a director more comfortable with equipment than people. His last outing was the utterly disposable “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which was about car theft, and was itself a remake of an utterly disposable film.

I will grant that Sena has a good visual sense and is quite skilled at moving the camera around (no doubt a holdover from his music video days), but his story skill, pacing, and inability to elicit anything memorable from his actors are deplorable. In “Swordfish” he focuses on computers instead of cars, and he falls prey to the same misconception that plagued the makers of the “Mission: Impossible” pictures, that watching people type on computer keyboards is inherently fascinating. It is not. It is boring, even if the people involved are good looking. Computers themselves are boring pieces of equipment; great tools, but nothing more than dumb servants. It is amazing to me that anyone in Hollywood still thinks that audiences will be thrilled by the sight of blinking consoles and multiple display screens. They are stuck with a mindset more suited to the era of the original “Star Trek” than the year 2001 and seem to forget that any yahoo with an internet hookup can probably download Lara Croft for a lap dance at will. “Swordfish” opens with a bravura action sequence, and ends with one too, but what comes in between is at best routine thriller boilerplate and at worst nonsensical (although one of the movie’s virtues is its brevity; at least Sena doesn’t overstay his welcome).

Among his other minions, Gabriel employs Ginger, played by the fetching Halle Berry (who, as has been widely reported, takes off her top for about ten seconds, in a thrilling homage to Hollywood’s tradition of completely gratuitous nudity). Ginger is the one who recruits Stanley, who is then tested by Gabriel in a sequence that might almost be offensive of it weren’t so stupid. Deciding that Stanley is the man for the job, Gabriel proceeds to confuse the heck out of both him and us as the movie clanks and rattles its way towards the end. His management style, by the way, seems to center around the “ominous invitation.” Gabriel is constantly inviting Stanley somewhere: “let’s have a drink,” “take a ride with me,” “walk with me,” “let’s have some coffee.” (I was tired just trying to keep up with all this peripatetic plot mongering.) Travolta has what fun he can with the role, but it is a rather silly part more reminiscent of James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld than any truly frightening criminal mastermind. (There is even a moment when Gabriel decides, against his “better judgment” to tell Stanley what’s going on. This is so retro I almost laughed out loud.) What Gabriel tells Stanley, is, of course, more fluff and misdirection, and in the end, it turns out that Gabriel is a whole lot less than the picture would like to believe. “Swordfish” goes its merry way without any apparent understanding of how the real power brokers in today’s world must operate. I suspect that the really scary operatives in the new millennium don’t own nightclubs and drive around shooting up the streets. They stay in the background, pulling the strings, and we never, ever, know their names. (6/24/2001)