Swordfish (2001)

 

Director: Dominic Sena

Screenplay: Skip Woods

Cast: John Travolta as Gabriel Shear; Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson; Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles; Don Cheadle as Agent J.T. Roberts; Sam Shepard as Senator James Reisman; Vinnie Jones as Marco; Drea de Matteo as Melissa; Rudolf Martin as Axl Torvalds

Ephemeral Waves

 

Swordfish takes a huge risk from the first scene, one willingly waving a red flag at the film critics of the time of its release, with John Travolta speaking to the camera about how unrealistic crime films are over an espresso. He even speaks about how even Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is unrealistic despite being an acclaimed film in the genre, [Huge Spoiler for that film] all because Sidney Lumet did not let the bank robbers get away with it [Spoilers End]. Swordfish as I will get into is a ridiculous film, so the brass balls of presumption to have this opening is hilarious, probably with full knowledge of the ridiculous gubbins the film gets into. Swordfish is an absurd film, and if I had to put a finger on why I hated this film once, as one of the worst films I ever saw, it is likely that I once held a stigma against "boring" Hollywood films. This was an era, the golden era of DVD rental stores, where I saw too many when my parents used to rent everything from a Global Video here in my English town. With the one or two weird titles that came through the exceptions to many of the big promoted titles of the 2000s, such as the low budget films which were able to slip in between the big budget films and be rented by accident, I saw a glut of the 2000 to 2005, to 2003 at least in terms of Hollywood. These are the titles, the pre-HD versus Blu-Ray war era of 2006, which lead to me having an allergy to big CGI explosions and remotely any sign the score was dictating the emotional cues in a film.

Swordfish is now an old film, and it presents a transitional period in Hollywood cinema, beginning with its co-producer Joel Silver. Silver would work throughout the 2000s and 2010s onwards, but his golden era is that of the golden age of American action films, from producing Lethal Weapon (1987) to Die Hard (1988), someone who expanded the types of films he was producing in the nineties with titles like The Matrix (1999) earning him success. He was however still returning to the bread-and-butter of his earlier career with action films, the changes to how they were presented how he continued from the eighties with films like the one covered in this review. Swordfish also presents us with a director, Dominic Sena, who came from the lineage of music video directors who were especially making their voices known in the nineties, working with the likes of Janet Jackson. Then there is a screenwriter with a tiny writer career altogether, Skip Woods, who was early within his work here but with the likes of The A-Team (2010), attempting to reboot the legendary eighties TV series, to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a divisive spin-off in the X-Men superhero series, I can now see where the cartoonish nature of Swordfish comes from. This is not detraction to this film, as the flaws are a greater problem than the tonal choices, but the later films showing where this one was coming from in terms of its screenwriter’s voice. Swordfish has the mentality to throw anything at the wall, even if nonsensical, and it is to the point this can be held responsible for an urban myth of a man being personally executed by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for treason, which just added a ridiculous cherry on top of this deeply flawed film. In many ways, tame in places but attempting edginess in others, this is a grindhouse exploitation film but on a Hollywood budget, if one with many issues that show blockbusters and exploitation films can share similar issues.

It has a plot, and that I had wrote that with tongue-in-cheek comes from this feeling like a pastiche of crime films, and not a detriment either. Hugh Jackman does find himself in a schism as someone who can played the washed and embittered figure of Stanley Jobson, old enough here to look like an aged renegade who went to prison, and crashed-and-burned after being a cool hot shot, but not as a hacker. It does not capsize his performance, but he feels like the Golden Age of Hollywood star who could never be this person in real life. If he as this character was anyone but a computer hacker, the image and style of performance would work in terms of verisimilitude. As a computer hacker, due to how it is portrayed here, it is up to Jackman's natural charisma to suspend disbelief. He has the virtue of the classical matinee idol, even when his big breakthrough was a 2000s plus phenomenon, the superhero becoming a more respectable casting choices as the films were making money, whose character in any other circumstances would not work if a similar actor like him was cast. Anyone else would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but he can make this matinee take on a hacker work in the same way Cary Grant would have stuck out, as we would have not minded, if dieselpunk was a concept in thirties Hollywood cinema.

The lynchpin that helps with the film to improve it, Jackson's character is a hero willing to commit a major hacking crime to steal millions from the US government, but he does so to earn the money needed to get legal custody of his daughter. In what could be an odd conservative slant, but I think is more a weird quirk of a film that is PG-13 for most of its tone, but prods at the older Joel Silver films which had more R-rated content, the ex-wife has connections in the adult film industry. The ex-wife is a troupe of action cinema anyway from John McClane, here a porn actress with her porn mogul boyfriend with a possible drama in a more complex melodrama even in a blockbuster action film left on the table. One where she is unhappy regardless of her career being porn or not, drinking all the time, in which no matter how she tries to connect to her daughter, her hatred for the husband pushes the adolescent away. Like some Hollywood films, i.e. many, that is not the case and she is an archetype that does cause one to wonder how many screenwriters accidentally showed axes to grind, and in the case of Skip Woods here, may have just taken a troop from films he had seen before. The demonization of porn was an idiosyncratic spin but is so slight it is a weird quirk among many.

More so as, whilst this has moments of adult risqué, factoring the one infamous moment of the film involving the lead actress Halle Berry, playing the femme fatale who brings Jackman into John Travolta's plan, this is a film a world away from a gristly reality. This makes the sudden moments of adult tone more surprising with hindsight, considering Jackman's test for the job is literally attempting to hack the US government's secret website whilst former soccer/football player Vinnie Jones has a gun to his head, and a woman is giving him oral under the work table, flickering of an old R-rated film here and there abrupt when it happens. Most of the film however is a broad over-the-top story; even if there are casualties, including one hostage in the opening at the heist blown up by a contraption she has on, one foot is in the nineties Hollywood mould and one in the new era means that everything is broad, of archetypes and lack of causality. Considering as well hacking is the title premise too, expect none of it to be realistic at all, with actors talking jargon and all meant to look cool in a "cinematic way". It is also less a concern than being a bank heist film, which presents in itself the sense of this film trying to match a new era, where the internet would become more prominent, only to still feel awkward.

The prominence of John Travolta is notable for the tone, and another factor affecting your ability to enjoy this or not is how you gauge his character and performance, the villain Gabriel Shear already idiosyncratic before you have later era Travolta acting interpreting him. I do not mind him here, and actually found him one of the more entertaining aspects, if with a caveat that the performance does expose too much. Travolta, already by this point having played Nicolas Cage, who played him, in John Woo's Face/Off (1997), an example of strange Hollywood cinema when it is done right, can have good scenery chewing. He really was knee capped, even if you do not factor in the controversies of the Church of Scientology, when Battlefield Earth (2000) was released, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel which a) had the controversies of Scientology, from its founder's voice in the text, as an albatross, b) had a drubbing that lasted to the modern day, and c) presented John Travolta as the lead evil alien in dreadlocks, giant platforms and leather costume hamming the performance so much it could turn some vegetarian. The Face/Off reference is appropriate as Travolta could have done a Nicolas Cage, who managed to ride financial debt and mockery to be an unsung hero in terms of committing himself to acting both well and/or so far up to eleven he transcended the mockery. Travolta here, since he is the most prominent aspect of Swordfish, struggles with a sense of self seriousness here, trying to be "cool" in his suits, slicked back hair, taste in expensive coffee and high lofty musings provided by Skip Woods' script. He is meant to be the awesome real anti-hero, but if Nicolas Cage had played this role, it would have worked despite the other problems with the film, whilst there is a sense of artificiality with the performance with Travolta that does undercut this. Despite being one of the memorable aspects for the better with the film, it does accidentally expose something beyond the film to consider with any other performance of his when I encounter it.

The biggest problem with a film like this for all its mad turns, a film about hacking that eventually however leads to a bus of hostages being carried along in the air by a helicopter, entirely in the fantastical more over the top than most fantasy, is one that lead to me being ambivalent to blockbusters from youth. So many, as here, we would dismiss as "mindless" to munch popcorn to, but in truth, for all of us saying we want to have serious profound dramas all the time, most of us just want to have a fun time but with the issue always instead finding something wanting. So many of these films as here you could pluck out cast members and plot points entirely underutilized and see the problem was always that the films skimmed over their most interesting aspects. With the aspects you begin the count being underutilized, the real folly of many blockbusters I dismissed in my youth were where you had weirder, more tantalising premises never fulfilled.

Whatever you think of the acting potential of Vinnie Jones, the notorious Wimbledon F.C. soccer player who was as known for his aggressive on-pitch style as much as for the work he did as a player in a variety of team, he gets little here it is strange he was even cast. Considering the only time you see him stand out, threatening to use rocker launcher ammunition as a suppository on one of the hostages, is just near his end of a role as a generic thug, all the real issues with blockbusters was always the lesser sum of all the parts of their high budgets and casts. The example which stands out is with Halle Berry. It is tasteless to say this, but Swordfish became the film where she as an actress was comfortable going a topless nude scene sunbathing. It only becomes sleazy when reduced to the images of a celebrity as a sexualised object, rather than the actress comfortable committing to the image of eroticism, something you get from the "Mr. Skin" attitude of reducing an actress' entire career to a compilation of her nude scenes out of context, a reference to a real life website that specializes in locating, posting, and rating instances of female nudity in television and film¹. In context, the scene is not tasteless, but plays as a sex comedy bit where Berry, who did the scene to become more confident in her own body onscreen², becomes the figure in control, whilst it is Hugh Jackman who becomes the punch line to the empowered and comfortable woman, even blushing in his character in the moment. Far more insulting with time having past is simply how little Berry actually has to do. It is more egregious your sole female lead has nothing to do, a femme fatale who may be playing both sides but is a blank slate. Even a "dumb" action film could have benefited from what film noir did, the ability to give actresses in these potentially dubious roles meaty performances as compelling figures, something you could see Halle Berry do in what little she has here, but never gets.

Swordfish is okay, where really the issue is of how so many of these films have everything but feel like disparate parts. This is more so the case as, for a film released a few months before the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the start of the second Gulf War, one of the more compelling loose ends is the knowledge that Travolta's character is actually a black ops agent, a thief who is stealing his own country's money to fund protecting the country from terrorist threats. This kind of subversive touch, lost in the ballyhoo, could have been something to let breathe and allow this a knowing air of subversion and weirdness. This is more so now, as mentioned in the review, it is likely due to this film, from one glib comment in this film from Travolta about U.S. President Thomas Jefferson personally seeing to a treasonous person, that people thought this actually happened despite the fact the screenwriter clearly added that into the dialogue as a fictitious flourish^{3a & 3b}. This perverse afterlife to the film is weirder than fiction, making one wonder what this series of fragments, proudly as over-the-top as possible, could have been if playing more to these crime tropes fully committed to a mad edge. Far from the worst film ever made nowadays, Swordfish however from my teen years, like many of those films, could have been lodged fully into the memory if it had the courage to go up to eleven than just come off as silly. Face/Off, brought up earlier in this review, was a silly film I first saw in my teenage years, but it is remembered for good reasons, which is not surprising as director John Woo, able to fully unleash his style from his eighties Hong Kong films, came from a style of filmmaking that never let the stranger or even kitsch aspects undercut taking their dramas seriously nor not making the action scenes as inventive as possible. If this got sillier and Travolta got to pontificate more on movies over espressos, Swordfish could have been something more even if it had become a favourite “so-bad-it’s-good” movie for people to talk of on podcasts, but instead what it is cautious as too many of these films are.

 

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1) The nadir of this, which I am amazed was allowed to go forth, is of course when Seth MacFarlane hosted the 2013 Oscars and performed the song We Saw Your Boobs, which came off as a demeaning when, to be honest, a song called "We Saw Your Butt" about male nude scenes might have avoided this by playing to a jovial glee without the gender bias.

2) Halle Berry bares her soul, written by Bruce Kirkland for Canoe.ca, archived from the original published July 11^th 2012, originally published July 20^th 2009.

3a) Execution on the White House Lawn, taken from Monticell.org.

3b) Jefferson still survives, unlike the other guy, written by Anna Berkes for Jefferson Library.wordpress, published November 5th 2008.