Swordfish Review

That opening is the best thing anyone involved made. Travolta sits in a diner explaining what is wrong with American movies, and then the camera goes outside and detonates a bank in a slow rotating sweep, pulling ball bearings and shattered glass through the frame in one continuous move built from a ring of still cameras. It cost a fortune and it is worth every cent. Nothing afterward earns it. Dominic Sena and writer Skip Woods hang a caper on hacking scenes that are pure theatre, including a break-in staged under conditions invented purely so the sequence would be talked about later.

Hugh Jackman works hard, and there is a real performance buried in the scenes about the daughter he cannot see, but he spends most of the runtime typing furiously and looking worried at monitors. Travolta plays Gabriel as a lecture rather than a person. The final reversal arrives with no groundwork whatsoever, which retroactively turns the two hours of double-crossing into a shrug. Halle Berry and Don Cheadle are both used as furniture, and Cheadle especially is given nothing a performer could hold on to.