fludd.org - Movie Review

With an impressive cast and a fairly experience crew standing behind it, Swordfish looks like a movie that has it all. Having it all means having the potential to perform well for both the critics and the audience. Unfortunately, despite looking really amazing and extremely eye-candy, Swordfish is just another blockbuster among others that you watch and then forget. Why is that so? The big problem with Swordfish is not the potential of its script. It's rather the fact that the script really seems to go nowhere in spite of the actors' effort to make it look interesting.

In the first place, Swordfish certainly has big-shot actors like Hugh Jackman (X-Men 2: X-Men United), Halle Berry (X-Men 2: X-Men United) and John Travolta (Pulp Fiction). Virtually every actors who are part of the cast are entitled, in their own rights, to have their talent recognized. If we look at the leading actors (i.e. Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, John Travolta and Don Cheadle), they certainly bring depth to their characters given the nuances that definitely characterize their respective character. However, the actors of Swordfish really have their hands tied by the lack of quality in the script.

The movie's script could have certainly been better. At least, let's consider Swordfish's script as what it is: a weird and pathetic storyline that might look a little bit hard to follow. Again, at the second glance, the movie's script isn't that hard to understand. The first quality of Swordfish's storyline is obviously its fast pace. Despite lasting 99 minutes, the time in the movie is quite well exploited in order to make the story progress without wasting our time. However, that doesn't mean that the script is flawless.

In fact, the presence of useless scenes that don't help the movie to get to its point needs to be justified as much as the lack of common sense from the scriptwriters, when it comes to dealing with realism and logic. That being said, the movie tries to be extremely clever, but becomes almost funny in the process. Think about another pathetic element: Hugh Jackman obviously plays a hacker, but he just doesn't look like someone who has spent so much time in front of a computer if you take in consideration his hairspray and his big muscles that make him closer to Wolverine, a character in the movie X-Men. Besides, his character is too much in a good shape to look like a hacker if you think about the scene in which he tries to run away from a small team of FBI agents led by Agent J.T. Roberts.

I personally didn't find the movie very good or entertaining, but if you're looking for entertainment, you can be sure that your time will not be wasted. In fact, Swordfish is evidently a movie brimming with entertainment.

No wonder why Swordfish got three nominations at the World Stunt Awards. By the way, this is definitely not a way to compliment the movie, because of its script that tries to be clever without being clever at all. Moreover, let's also remind you that the movie was nominated at the Razzie Awards for the worst actor (John Travolta). This choice can rather be questioned, because in this movie, Travolta rather excels in portraying a caricature. Despite the script's flaws, he certainly remains the best actor of the whole cast.

In short, the movie certainly has its share of eye-candy element that lies mostly on Halle Berry, the action scenes and the movie's other visual effects. Aside from that, Swordfish is not really worth watching, because the script is just so thin. While trying to look ambitious, the movies just get filled with ridiculous situations.

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