Swordfish (2001)

Swordfish arrives from 2001, a solid vintage for expensive nonsense, and it presents itself as a heist picture about hacking nine and a half billion dollars out of a government slush fund. Dominic Sena directs with a straight face and a fondness for explosions detonated before the audience has located its seat. John Travolta plays Gabriel Shear, a rogue operative with an appetite for speeches, and Hugh Jackman plays the disgraced hacker dragged along behind him. The cast is noticeably integrated for its era, with Don Cheadle and Halle Berry holding substantial roles. Nobody in the film remarks on this. It simply is.

Travolta's Shear enjoys explaining things. He lectures about terrorism, about misdirection, about the machinery of covert government work, and he pauses a bank robbery to discuss Dog Day Afternoon with a federal agent. The film also hands him an anecdote about Thomas Jefferson personally executing a man named Rodney Cox for treason. There is no evidence Cox existed. The invented story has since escaped into the wild as an urban legend, which is a heavier cultural footprint than the rest of the picture earns. Meanwhile, the heist exists to fund black-ops counterterrorism, a fantasy of shadowy state power that sits nowhere near any critique of wealth.

The film's reputation, such as it is, rests on Halle Berry's topless scene, a moment the press covered long before release and which Berry herself has called gratuitous. Her character is a capable undercover operative in theory, but the camera's interests run elsewhere. Hacking, here, looks like three-dimensional geometry floating in space, a visual language that has aged into comedy. The whole enterprise is a Bond film stripped of its wit, as reviewers noted at the time, and the intervening years have not supplied the missing charm. We log it as a middling specimen: some old-fashioned movie-star charisma, no meaningful social instruction, and one durable piece of fabricated American history.