The Travolta/Cage Project #65 Swordfish (2001)

When it comes to depictions of hackers and hacking in pop culture, we tend to oscillate wildly between extremes. 

On one hand we have the deathless stereotype of the hacker as the ultimate geek, a morbidly obese loser in loose-fitting sweatpants and an anime tee-shirt who lives in his mom’s basement and remains a virgin deep into middle age. 

This popular image of hackers as sexless and lame co-exists uncomfortably with an antithetical conception of hackers as impossibly sexy, androgynous badasses in tight leather achieving technological miracles while listening to techno, drinking and generally luxuriating in their own outlaw awesomeness. 

Movies about hackers consequently either make a lame, overly familiar joke of their awkwardness and lack of social skills or they cynically try to make the dry, tedious, defiantly non-cinematic act of a Poindexter punching numbers on a computer laptop seem as cinematic and dynamic as possible by pushing the attitude and style to ridiculous levels. 

Depending on your perspective, the staggeringly idiotic 2001 cyber-thriller Swordfish marks either the apex or the nadir of pop cinema’s desperate need to sexy up hacking in ways that border on surreal. 

Casting Wolverine as the world’s greatest hacker is only the beginning! According to IMDB, Swordfish cast Jackman in the lead role of super-hacker Stanley because “he didn't bring too much baggage from other films” with him.

That is wildly ironic, since it’s damn near impossible to see Jackman in anything and not immediately think of his signature role of Wolverine in the X-Men universe. Jackman is synonymous with Wolverine the same way Jim Varney was synonymous with Ernest P. Worrell and Paul Reubens is known for Pee-Wee Herman. 

Swordfish didn’t just end up casting a guy with some pop culture baggage; they cast someone with the most pop culture baggage in a role that promised not to change the way anyone thought of him. 

Hugh Jackman is one sexy hacker. He’s so sexy, in fact, that it is absolutely impossible to buy him as any kind of hacker for even a second, let alone someone who is repeatedly referred to as THE GREATEST HACKER IN THE WORLD. 

It’s not enough, however, for Swordfish to revolve around the sexiest hacker in the history of sexy hackers. No, it must also amp up the sexiness around this impossibly sexy hacker to a self-parodic degree. 

In a sequence idiotic even by Swordfish’s low, low standards, mysterious, cigar-chomping Gabriel Shear (John Travolta, in a hammy, Golden Raspberry-nominated turn of great quantity and little quality) decides to test Stanley’s skill by seeing if he can hack a tough case in a very limited amount of time. 

The twist? The sexy, sexy twist? In order to make things more interesting, for the audience, as well as Stanley, while THE WORLD’S GREATEST HACKER is engaged in world-class hacking a beautiful woman, played by a real-life Playboy Playmate, is very aggressively performing oral sex on the poor/obscenely lucky man’s engorged member. 

All the while Gabriel and his equally enigmatic, even sexier lover/moll/sidekick Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) look on intently to see whether or not an unexpected blow job will keep Stanley from successfully completing the task before him. 

Stanley passes the test, despite getting his nob slobbed by a nubile sex pot, but he does not seem at all happy about it. 

It’s the movie in a nutshell: it’s pathologically intent on providing a non-stop assault of sexy, sordid, transgressive thrills but it’s so obnoxious in its unmerited self-love that it’s no goddamn fun at all. It’s just exhausting.

We end up feeling like Stanley: jerked around mercilessly by sexy weirdoes with inscrutable motives when we just want to be left alone. Also, what the hell kind of a name is Stanley for a sexy hacker? 

Stanley is so good at hacking that he’s legally forbidden from even using a computer. He’s so broke he can’t afford a lawyer to help him fight the restraining order his ex-wife, now working in pornography, put in place to keep him from ever seeing his daughter. 

So when Gabriel shows up and offers Stanley ten million dollars to help him purloin 9.5 billion dollars he’s reluctant to get into bed with such unsavory figures but he also doesn’t think he has any other options. 

Roughly one hundred percent of the attention Berry’s performance here received was for a topless scene that redefines the word “gratuitous.” That’s sadly appropriate, as the Academy Award winner is on hand purely as eye candy, a dangerous babe with attitude to spare. 

Ginger embodies the film’s juvenile conception of coolness, its adolescent preoccupation with edge at the expense of everything else. She’s so fucking cool and hip and edgy that, like the film she’s imprisoned in, she actually comes off as pretty lame.  

Nothing is less cool than trying too hard to be cool, which is Swordfish’s fatal flaw. In music video veteran Dominic Sena, Swordfish shares a director and much else with a recent entry in this series, Gone in 60 Seconds. 

The Joel Silver-produced box office disappointment is unabashedly vulgar, tacky and excessive, a proud B movie with a 100 million dollar A-list budget. What Swordfish desperately lacks is the moral center Nicolas Cage brought to Gone in 60 Seconds, the sense that in this gaudy, crass, mercenary world at least someone still believed in something, and was willing to fight for it. Jackman, in sharp contrast, seems to be in the movie against his will. His body is present but his mind and spirit seem to be elsewhere. 

Swordfish was written by Skip Woods, who I first encountered when I reviewed a punchy little Tarantino knockoff called Thursday that he wrote for the A.V Club in my early days as a critic who specialized in direct-to-video thrillers. Woods is still ripping off Tarantino here but the budget and the scope are exponentially bigger. He also has the Oscar-nominated star of Pulp Fiction in the lead but the spirit remains the same, a derivative, schlocky aggression that proves thoroughly charmless and exhausting. 

The Tarantino worship extends to giving Travolta MULTIPLE monologues about famous films of yesteryear, including an extended riff on how Dog Day Afternoon just wasn’t violent enough delivered directly to the camera in a speech that opens the film and a later discussion of Sugarland Express. 

Hearing Travolta lovingly discourse on Dog Day Afternoon just made me wish that I was watching a Sidney Lumet masterpiece from the 1970s instead of insulting garbage from the early oughts. 

One of the items in the IMDB trivia for Swordfish is "John Travolta and Hugh Jackman both love to sing show tunes. On set, they often sang songs from Oklahoma! and other musicals together.” 

I would love to be a fly on the wall when Jackman and Travolta escaped the joyless, mercenary drudgery of making Swordfish by enthusiastically crooning their favorite show tunes. I guarantee it would be a whole lot more entertaining than Swordfish. 

Travolta and Jackman just want to sing and dance but the cruel forces of commerce force them to make action movies. 

With Travolta at this uncertain stage of his career, hair became destiny. It was an era of bad hair, bad choices, bad performances and bad films, and Travolta’s unflattering air strip soul patch and flowing locks represent one of his very worst looks from one of his most obnoxious and insufferable vehicles. 

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