Review: Swordfish: Lowering the boom

Geoff Carter

Wednesday, June 6, 2001 | 2:24 a.m.

Grade:Two and one half stars.

Starring: John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry and Don Cheadle.

Screenplay: Skip Woods.

Director: Dominic Sena

Rated: Rated R for violence, language and some sexuality/nudity.

Running time: 97 minutes.

"Swordfish" opens with one of the greatest cinematic explosions I've ever seen. A group of terrorists led by sociopath Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) has wired 20-odd hostages with their weight in plastic explosives and jawbreaker-sized steel ball bearings, and when one of them goes off -- it's gotta be done -- the camera does a complete (computer-generated) circle of the action, making mini-documentaries of every car, every window and SWAT officer fallen by the shrapnel.

The sequence takes a good 30 seconds, and when it's done it's all the audience can do not to leap to its feet and demand the immediate detonation of the other hostages. We've seen scores of explosions in action movies -- when was the last time one of them had a crunchy center?

But unbelievably, that's not the gasp-inducing explosion. That comes at the very beginning of the picture, when Travolta's character faces down the camera and says, "You know what the problem is with Hollywood? They make (excrement)." When the star of "Battlefield Earth," "Lucky Numbers" and no less than three talking baby movies drops a bomb like that, attention must be paid.

As it turns out, "Swordfish" isn't a bomb, nor is it a dud. It isn't even the excrement projectile Travolta promises in the film's opening monologue. It's a great-looking, smart-mouthed action movie that has a detonator for a heart and a carton of ball bearings for a head. It takes so many familiar turns that comparing it to other genre films is a futile gesture; I'll just say "The Matrix" meets et al and be done with it.

Seeing as no studio head has ever green-lit a collection of killer action sequences without a plot, no matter how thin (how quaint that custom?), "Swordfish" blows the dust off the old covert operations device and scans it into a Dell (whose machines are practically a character). Shear needs to hit a DEA slush fund to keep those illicit anti-terrorist fires burning, so he recruits recently paroled superstar hacker Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) through a comely assistant, Ginger (Halle Berry). Meanwhile, an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) closes in on the operation, much to everyone's displeasure.

To say that it gets murky is an understatement; for a film that states its intent so early on, there's a lot of underground blasts late in the picture: many, many effects with no visible cause. There's a pair of amazing chases (why director Dominic Sena couldn't have brought some of this expertise to hid dreadful "Gone in Sixty Seconds" is a mystery), some terrific vamping by Travolta and Berry and a solid performance from Jackman, who's got "$25 million action star" written all over his pectorals.

But flash and trash notwithstanding, the ending is distant and unsatisfying, and leaves too much hanging to the wind. We don't expect great cinema from producer Joel Silver's movies ("Lethal Weapon," "The Matrix") but we do expect one thing -- a big explosion at the end. The explosion at the end of "Swordfish" disintegrates into pixilated mush, when nothing short of a faceful of debris is needed to seal the deal. In a movie that strives for metaphor, "Swordfish's" last, unintentional one is the only one that sticks.