Swordfish (2001)

Saw Swordfish on the assumption that it was a dumb computer-hacker movie.  It was dumb, yes, but it turned out to be more of a heist movie.  There's crosses and double-crosses and smirking bad guys and all that jazz.  There is hacking which is a little tangential, but also dumb.

However, the main thing I noticed about this film, was this it was clearly trying to be The Matrix.  It opens with one of those famous rotate-y shots that The Matrix made famous and involves the main character (a hacker) being swallowed into a shadowy netherworld of shell corporations and government secrecy.  In one scene, there is even scrolling ascii characters, but these ones are scrolling sideways (so, you know, a completely original visual.)  Whereas The Matrix is not really set in any place (apart from a city of some kind,) this film is emphatically Los Angeles styled down to a yellow filter over everything.

So okay, but this movie is also very dumb.  In the modern heist-film tradition, it features a lot of trashiness: ladies in tight-fitting outfits lounge around everywhere and, as a particularly egregious example, the main character "auditions" for his role as heist hacker by cracking into a government website while being given a blowjob.  It's pretty crass.

Let me talk a little about the tech before wrapping up: the tech is absolutely nonsense.  They throw around random words which are not complete nonsense, but are unrelated to what's going on.  (eg: "I dropped a logic bomb." "You didn't have time.") There's a sequence where the main character codes for a little while which is gratuitous and heightened.  It's unreal but only because the character is dancing with happiness or rubbing his eyes with dismay.  The emotions are right, but they are more muted: annoyance followed by the satisfaction of seeing a green message appear rather than a red one, then on to the next red message.  It's dumb but I'll forgive it.  Watching someone stare at a screen, typing slowly, waiting for a minute and then grunting would not be compelling cinema.

Okay, so final thoughts: this was a big dumb movie, but I basically expected a big dumb movie.  I think it more or less succeeded in what it set out to do which was to give you, the male viewer, a little titillation and excitement mixed in with your power fantasy.  There's a couple of pointless chase scenes and the main antagonist is frustratingly smug, but if we're going to ding it for containing pointless stuff, well the whole movie is a little pointless, so what do you want?  This is a big dumb movie which is big and dumb.