Review: Swordfish

Swordfish is the second stupid movie in recent months -- Antitrust was the other -- to exploit the hacker myth/legend and wrap a mindless crash-bang action film around it. The first minutes of this film are promising, a neat riff on the nature of movies and their endings. But after that, there isn't an auto smash-up or explosion that this movie doesn't love. Maybe producers think it's hip to write goofy and unrealistic hacker characters into silly films, that they will make this tired form contemporary in some way. But if there's much more of this, the term "hacker" will become as distorted a word as the media has tried to make it. SPOILAGE WARNING: Plot is discussed, no ending.

There's no particular reason for hackers to be spared the Hollywood distortion machine any more than generals or cops, but this is a particularly distasteful perversion of an idea that, to my knowledge, has yet to be captured intelligently on film. The really dramatic hacker impact on the world -- especially on technology, work, creativity, freedom -- may just get lost to the peculiar history woven by American popular culture.

Swordfish has John Travolta playing Gabriel Shear, a shadowy, omnipotent, brutal globe-trotting villain (He "isn't like us. He does whatever he wants, gets what wants, goes where he wants," is the way one character describes him.) Problem is, it's never clear what he wants, and after a few minutes, you won't really care. Mostly, he likes to blow things up.

Shear goes to an extraordinary amount of trouble to coerce Stanley (Hugh Jackman), once the world's best hacker, into working for his evil organization, whose purpose is to destroy terrorists who target Americans.

Jackman, fresh out of Leavenworth (shades of Mitnick), has been forbidden by a federal judge from ever touching a computer again. We first see him in a decidedly un-hacker context, swatting golf balls atop a trailer in rural Texas where he has been exiled with his mutt, working as a mechanic. Mostly, he pines for his daugher, taken from him by his villainous and drunken ex-wife, now shacked up in L.A. with a rich porn producer. Stanley, we learn, sacrificed himself and his family to plant a bug in the FBI's Carnivore tracking program, in a one-man crusade to protect his friend's e-mail, as he so stirringly explains. His work, grumbles FBI Agent Roberts (Don Cheadle, who seems to play a lot of sweet-hearted federal agents these days) set Carnivore back two years. The world should be so lucky.

Presumably, this explanation is supposed to make all of you seek, like and recommend this movie, since Carnivore is never explained in the film and the reference will make no sense to 99 percent of the people who go see it. You can be sure that real hackers sure won't.

Stanley, who will go to any lengths to get his kid back, abandons his dog and accepts Gabriel's offer of $10 million to hack into DEA computers, get hold of $9 billion in laundered drug money, and transfer it to Gabriel's account. For reasons that are never explained, this bloodless crime can't be accomplished without destroying half the cars in L.A. After interminable self-righteous heming and hawing, Stanley goes along, breaking into one encrypted file after another in seconds (often at gunpoint or with his daughter's life hanging in the balance) and spouting much self-righteous rhetoric about violence and whether ends justify means. To get custody of his daughter, though, he is willing to tolerate a few thousand bodies flying through the air, though he is at continuous pains to disapprove. Gabriel, can't, of course, off him, since he's the biggest bad-ass hacker on the planet, and nobody else could crack the DEA's code.

In any case, Stanley's moral objections vanish when he sees the cool equipment Shear gives him to use. Code flies. Real hackers will gag at one especially grotesque scene in which Stanley practically humps his machine while cracking through firewalls, gasping, breathing heavily and guzzling expensive wine. The producers' idea of gritty computing reality is to have their hackers wearing filthy t-shirts.

The screenwriters evidenly had a tough time trying to rationalize the existence of this improbable "hacker" character. Since hackers are inherently evil, according to popular lore, Stanley can't resist Gabriel's murderous and psychotic scheme. But since computers and the Net are cool (read: popular among kids), and he loves his daughter, Stanley can't be bad enough to do Gabriel's dirty work without relentless coercion and then, towards the end of this interminable tale, trying to heroically and improbably -- especially for a hacker -- redeem himself. Halle Berry gets tossed awkwardly in as something other than she first appears to be, and the spectre of the DEA hovers over the film, even though nothing in this mess of a plot has anything to do with drugs. We learn early on in the movie that there are certain powerful forces within the government (duh) who are conspiring to abuse their power to protect their interests and run the world.

Apart from the first riff by Travolta on the movie Dog Day Afternoon, an engaging opening that teases us into thinking we might be in for a half-decent movie, Swordfish descends steadily into a C- action movie that leaves no building intact, no car upright, no hacker cliche untouched.

At least Tomb Raider will be out next week. They can't stink that one up any more than this.