Swordfish (film)
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Swordfish (sometimes referred to as Password: Swordfish or Operation: Swordfish) is a cyberpunk-action/thriller film released in 2001. It was directed by Dominic Sena and stars Hugh Jackman, John Travolta, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, and Vinnie Jones.
Plot
Stanley (played by Hugh Jackman), a hacker prodigy, is brought out of retirement by underworld mastermind Gabriel (John Travolta) and his assistant Ginger (Halle Berry). They want him to electronically break into the banking system to steal the assets of a secret government slush fund. In return for his help, they promise to help Stanley gain custody of his daughter. Eventually Gabriel reveals that they are not simple criminals but rather are rogue agents waging a covert war against terrorism, even when the governments that originally hired them no longer support such a mission. The stolen funds would allow them unlimited resources in this struggle.
The film was criticized for cynicism, as the supposedly good guys use hostage-taking as an integral part of their heist, brutalizing them in vivid scenes and causing several deaths. The Gabriel character debates this issue, asking Stanley whether he would sacrifice a few thousand lives to save a few million. These issues in the film became especially controversial after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The film is best remembered for its visually stunning opening scene, involving a huge variety of state-of-the-art CGI and special effects techniques.
Trivia
- A lingering topless scene featuring Berry was highly controversial because rumors persist that, in the midst of filming, Warner Brothers executives offered Berry $2m to do the scene, thinking it would boost the movie's revenue. Both Warner Brothers and Berry deny this; however, the nudity is not relevant to anything in the plot. Berry has said that she did the topless scene as practice in order to get emotionally ready for the much more explicit sex scene in Monster's Ball.
- Hacker lingo is used throughout the film. At one point, Jackman claims to have "popped the firewall and dropped in a logic bomb."
- Jackman's character works at a bank of computers that in one scene features a variation of the Matrix source code used in the 1999 film The Matrix. Film producer Joel Silver was also involved in the Matrix series.
- A copy of Neuromancer is on his daughter's bedroom floor.
- A Finn named Axl Torvalds (Rudolf Martin) appears early in the film, a pun on the Linux godfather Linus Torvalds. In one scene he is supposed to speak Finnish, but in fact speaks German, an essentially unrelated language. His passport is also German. In the German language version, Torvalds was synchronized by a Finn.
- The title comes from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie, Horse Feathers, in which Groucho and Chico Marx perform an elaborate routine involving the word to get into a speakeasy.
- Jackman and Berry originally worked together in 2000's X-Men. Vinnie Jones joined them in X-Men 3: The Last Stand in 2006.
- Travolta drove a TVR Tuscan in the movie. The car has British number plates and is in a typical British configuration - right hand drive and manual transmission. The 'W' at the beginning of the license plate/ number plate indicates that the car was first purchased between March and July 2000. These details confused many North American viewers and also Jackman's character who stated 'I can't drive this' when told to by Travolta's character.
Tagline
- "Log on. Hack in. Go anywhere. Steal everything."
- "Password Accepted."
External links
- [Official site]
- [}}}] at Rotten Tomatoes
- [}}}] at Box Office Mojo
- [Press Release] on helicopter sequence from helicopter owner/operator [Erickson Air-Crane]
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