Swordfish review

Swordfish opens with John Travolta's character Gabriel bemoaning the state of the movies. "You know the problem with Hollywood?", he declares. "They make ****." And for the next hour and a half his statement is proved right.

It's difficult to explain quite where the fault lies. One suggestion would be the overly plotted script that makes it all but impossible to figure out what's happening to whom and why. Another might be in director Dominic Sena's (Gone In Sixty Seconds) focus on style over content, resulting in what looks like a slick, extended commercial. It's hardly surprising when you consider that Sena's background is in directing ads. However you choose to look at this self-conscious cyber thriller, there's little to recommend it unless the sight of a perpetually half naked Halle Berry is a sufficient distraction.

In terms of plot, the succinct version is that Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) is a renowned computer hacker down on his luck after a spell in prison who's hired by mastermind Gabriel Shear to hack his way into the government's accounts and steal $9.5 billion. Written down like that it seems so simple. It's when it gets on screen that things get a little complicated.

The film's most dramatic moment comes at the very beginning during the course of a bank robbery instigated by the enigmatic and sophisticated Gabriel whose exotic lifestyle is defined by a colleague who declares, "What we only fantasize, he does". When one of the robbery hostages strapped with explosives blows up, the ensuing carnage is captured on 135 synchronised still cameras that freeze and twist the horror to great effect.

From there the action back-pedals four days as preparations are being made for the robbery. When Gabriel's first choice hacker is intercepted by customs at the airport, he is swiftly despatched by Gabriel's henchman Marco (Vinnie Jones), before FBI agent Roberts (Don Cheadle) can interrogate him. Forced to find a back up, Gabriel sends Ginger (Halle Berry) to recruit Stanley. When her persuasive manner and short skirt fail, the introductory offer of $100,000 just to talk to her boss succeeds. The ensuing talk becomes an audition in which Stanley has to demonstrate his hacking prowess by breaking the Department of Defence code, a task made all the more difficult with the distraction of a gun pointed at his head while one of Gabriel's angels is giving him head. That early moment combining computers, violence and sex encapsulates the film's main themes. Had the events been taking place on a fast car in the course of a pursuit, then they could have ended the film there and then and saved everyone's time.

In a film inhabited mostly by broadly drawn characters of indeterminate virtue who utter lines like "Someone's ****'s going to end up on the block and I guarantee it's not going to be mine", the one concession to feelings other than lust, greed and anger come via Stanley's relationship with his estranged young daughter. But as such it is seen for the flagrant tokenism it is. Swordfish is more successful when it doesn't pretend to be anything other than a gratuitous, testosterone stunt fest with one particularly brazen escapade involving the Downtown Los Angeles skyline, a helicopter and bus being a prime example.

Ultimately, though, Swordfish offers nothing in the way of originality, causing it to be subject to another of Gabriel's scathing indictments of Hollywood: "They didn't push the envelope".