Swordfish
**
Cinema
Releases - July 27, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 99
minutes. Directed by Dominic Sena. Written by Skip Woods. Starring Hugh Jackman,
John Travolta, Halle Berry, Craig Braun, Don Cheadle.
"Swordfish" is a chic little thriller
that turns into subtle propaganda. I sat through most of the movie entertained,
and ended up leaving offended.
Hugh Jackman stars as a computer hacker enlisted
by a criminal mastermind played by John Travolta. Travolta wants Jackman
to help him rob the Federal Reserve. Jackman is nervous about doing this,
because he's on parole, and wants custody of his daughter. But Travolta makes
him a few offers he can't refuse, and so the hacking begins.
The Travolta character is a strange sort of guy,
who rides around in flashy cars, wears designer suits, and seems to inhabit
countless lairs full of expensive décor and stylish henchmen. He speaks
in riddles, keeps things hidden, springs surprises and shows a ruthless
temperament.
It is at the end of the movie, after Travolta
has clearly been established as a psycho nutjob, that he reveals the reasons
for his criminal operations. He declares that he is a patriot who needs money
to fund anti-terrorist operations, and when he shoots people trying to stop
him, he's merely making sacrifices to protect America from itself in pursuit
of a higher cause.
It is clear that the filmmakers don't want us
to buy this argument. When Travolta talks of his mission, we're supposed
to interpret it as the rant of a madman. And that pissed me off -- "Swordfish"
begins as slick, involving entertainment and ends up just another tool in
the corporate media machine, which has been working for years to dumb us
down into slavish trust of conservative government and suspicion of any other
forms of thought.
I'll give you an example of what I mean. When
Timothy McVeigh was found to be responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombing,
the media painted him as deranged white trash who murdered a lot of kids
with no reasonable motive. Little attention was given to the fact that he
was a Gulf War veteran, taught to kill by the military; that he was planning
to target the ATF department of the building as protest against big government;
that he did not know there was a day care centre in the building; that although
he regretted his actions, he did not apologise because the government had
refused to apologise for the innocent men, women and children killed in the
Gulf War.
The point here is not that I support McVeigh,
or even that I would support independent soldiers like the Travolta character.
The point is that movies like "Swordfish", along with bad news reporting
and other corrupt penetrations of our sources of information, teach us to
think in one-dimensional terms about things and lose our ability to sense
what's going on in the world. Those who have lost track of what I'm talking
about or think I'm mindlessly rambling are the victims of what I'm criticising.
Anyhow, this movie ends up sucking.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2001 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2001 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)