Here's my review of the movie Swordfish, as I sent it to the Internet Movie Database. (Yes, it took this long to get the movie here. I wonder what took them so long. *wink*)
Joel Silver has produced amazing movies. Let's see: "The Matrix" was a definitive philosophical action sci-fi movie, "Romeo Must Die" was a more than decent kung fu movie...
...and now he's producing, along other production people of the company, a truly ambitious project: Can this movie dethrone the 1995 movie "Hackers" as the turkey B-movie of techno-thrillers?
Unluckily, it doesn't. In this movie, they tried too hard to be good.
I heard of the movie some time ago and my immediate thoughts when seeing the poster was "God, this is the cheesiest slogan... ever. This thing is going to stink. Therefore, I have to see this." My today's trip to the movie theater was prophetic indeed: Row 6, Seat 6, and the movie started at 6 o'clock. When I was going there I noticed John Travolta's name on the poster. Ewwwww. Get the star of "Battlefield Earth" to the movie and hitting the rock bottom is a weekend seminar.
It was particularly ironic that Shear, Travolta's sinister character, starts the movie by talking how Hollywood movies suck because they have no realism. This particular movie, for example, does have serious holes in its realism.
Computers, programming and security intrusion in the movie have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. (In case you question my competence: I'm a computer geek. I know unrealistic computer-related scenario when I see one.) They sling technobabble around to make them look competent. In the beginning, the "Finnish" computer expert just mumbles something incomprehensible. (In case you question my competence: I ought to know my mother tongue.)
So far, so good. "Hackers" is threatened and scared to death. But they made serious mistakes and fell short...
The action scenes are more frequent and look pretty cool. "Hackers" had much less action. (Then again, the Movie Operating System things in Hackers looked vastly cooler than they did in this movie. But on that front, this movie wins because of more frequent use of technical-looking terms and numbers on weird places.) This Stanley cracker fellow, under pressure, slips something about cracking computer systems that actually works in real life. This destroys their attempt at dethroning Hackers. I reluctantly gave it a 4.
Ugh. I think I'm, after all this, glad Joel Silver could only contribute one bullet time effect to the movie...
Okay, so much for an official review... More details: They did try very hard to add "references to real life" to the movie, just like in Hackers... The MovieOS virus thing stored on PDP-11 in some university's basement? They mentioned Carnivore? A Finnish computer guy called Torvalds (though a bad guy this time)?