9 / 10
Official trailer
Swordfish is the most underrated thriller of the 2000s as far as I’m concerned.
Seen it three times. The 9 rating is what it earns. Dominic Sena directing. John Travolta as Gabriel Shear. Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson. Halle Berry as Ginger. Don Cheadle as Agent Roberts. Vinnie Jones, Sam Shepard, Drea de Matteo, and Rudolf Martin in support. The film was Hugh Jackman’s first major American leading role after X-Men (2000). Made approximately $147 million worldwide on a $102 million budget.
Swordfish is pure fun to me, the kind of slick, mean, overdesigned thriller I have a weakness for. The opening monologue and the explosion that follows it hit me as hard as any opening in the genre, and I like that under all the gloss the film is both an action thriller and a sour piece of commentary about post-Cold War American intelligence work. Critics got stuck on the wrong scene, and I think they missed a very good movie.
The Setup
Los Angeles. Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) is a brilliant computer hacker who served prison time for breaching FBI surveillance systems. He’s been released on parole. He’s divorced. He’s lost custody of his daughter Holly to his ex-wife Melissa, who has remarried a pornography producer. Stanley lives in poverty in a trailer outside Los Angeles. He’s not allowed to use computers under the terms of his parole.
Ginger (Halle Berry) approaches Stanley at a bar.
She offers him $100,000 just to meet her employer. Stanley needs money for legal representation in his custody battle. He agrees. He meets Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) at an isolated estate. Gabriel offers Stanley $10 million to hack into a Department of Defense slush fund called “Swordfish” and transfer approximately $9.5 billion. Gabriel claims the money will be used to fund a covert war against terrorism.
Stanley initially refuses. Gabriel shows the seriousness of the offer. He sets up a hacking demonstration where Stanley must complete a complex breach within sixty seconds while a woman performs oral sex on him and Gabriel holds a gun to his head. Stanley completes the breach. He accepts the job. The film documents what happens as Stanley discovers that Gabriel’s actual purpose is considerably different from the cover story he had been told.
The Opening Monologue
The film opens with John Travolta’s Gabriel delivering a four-minute monologue about Hollywood cinema. The monologue critiques Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and the conventions of bank robbery filmmaking. Gabriel argues that contemporary American cinema fails because the films refuse to commit to extreme stakes. The audience can’t trust the films because the films always pull back from real consequence.
The monologue is the film’s structural argument. Swordfish will commit to the extreme stakes it sets up. The film documents this commitment through the opening bus sequence that follows the monologue and through the eventual revelations about Gabriel’s actual operations. The monologue is meta-commentary about the film the audience is watching. The audience is being told what to expect before the action begins.
It’s a pleasure to watch a film tell you what it’s going to do and then do it. Most action films never address their own conventions, and giving the villain a four-minute lecture on Dog Day Afternoon is a big risk. Travolta sells every word, and the film pays off its promise of extreme stakes with the bus and again with what Gabriel turns out to be.
For Writers
Swordfish opens with a four-minute monologue that argues for the film’s own structural approach. The technique is rare because it requires the film to deliver what the monologue promises. If the film fails to commit to extreme stakes after the monologue argues for extreme stakes, the audience reads the failure as broken contract. Swordfish does commit. The opening bus sequence delivers the extreme stakes the monologue had promised. The Gabriel character’s actual operations deliver further extreme stakes.
The lesson for writers is that meta-commentary about your own work is high-risk technique. If your work commits to what your meta-commentary promises, the technique produces real structural strength. If your work fails to commit, the technique produces real structural weakness. Most films shouldn’t attempt this. Swordfish attempted it and delivered. The film’s contribution to action cinema includes this opening risk.
The Bus Sequence
The opening bus sequence is the film’s most studied set piece. Gabriel and his crew have taken hostages in a bank. The crew has rigged the hostages with explosive vests connected to ball bearings. The police are surrounding the bank. Gabriel allows one hostage to walk out.
The hostage walks toward the police line. The detonation kills the hostage and produces a 360-degree explosion that shreds everything within thirty feet.
The sequence is shot with what appears to be a 360-degree slow-motion camera rig.
The audience sees the explosion from multiple angles at once. The ball bearings tear through cars, lampposts, and police officers. The visual effect was produced through a combination of practical destruction, model work, and computer-generated imagery. The technique was unusual for 2001 action cinema.
That hostage explosion is the scene I’d point to if anyone asked why this gets a 9. Most action films would have cut away. Swordfish holds on it and shows the ball bearings tearing through cars and cops from every angle, and after that I trusted the film completely. It had told me it wouldn’t pull back from consequence, and it didn’t.
The John Travolta Performance
John Travolta plays Gabriel Shear with real controlled menace. Gabriel is intelligent. Gabriel is articulate. Gabriel is also operating from a worldview the audience can’t fully assess until the closing sequences. The performance requires Travolta to project complete commitment to a justification the audience can’t evaluate. He projects the commitment without revealing whether the justification is genuine.
The performance was Travolta’s most significant antagonist role at the time.
He had been operating in commercial leading work across Face/Off (1997), Phenomenon (1996), and other productions. The Gabriel role positioned him as villain at considerably higher tone than his earlier work had attempted. The performance is one of his strongest in his late career and shows capability his commercial leading work hadn’t been allowing him to display.
Gabriel’s actual identity is the film’s structural mystery. The film withholds the information that Gabriel is operating a covert intelligence operation instead of a conventional criminal scheme. The performance has to support both readings.
Travolta plays Gabriel as criminal in the first three acts and reveals the intelligence officer underneath in the final sequences. The dual reading is the performance’s central achievement. The work supports both interpretations without making either feel false.
The Hugh Jackman Performance
Hugh Jackman plays Stanley Jobson at the height of his early international career. He’d broken through in X-Men (2000) playing Wolverine. Swordfish was his first major non-X-Men leading role in American cinema. The casting was a heavy commercial test. The success of Swordfish helped establish his career independent of the X-Men franchise.
The performance is more restrained than the character’s circumstances might have suggested. Jackman could have played Stanley with real theatrical intensity. He’s a desperate father fighting for his daughter’s custody while being coerced into international cybercrime. Jackman plays the character with real professional discipline instead. Stanley is a hacker. Hackers work quietly. The performance respects the technical aspects of the character instead of reaching for melodramatic moments.
Jackman’s later career has been real. The Prestige (2006), Les Misérables (2012), Logan (2017), The Greatest Showman (2017), and other productions.
The Stanley Jobson role established his capability as dramatic leading man. I think the casting decision turned out to be exactly right. Jackman became a leading man among the most consistent of his generation. Swordfish helped position him for the wider career.
The Halle Berry Performance
Halle Berry plays Ginger as the recruiter and morally complicated supporting figure. The role was serious within the production’s context. Berry was paid an additional fee for a scene that required her to appear topless. The scene attracted considerable media attention at the time of release. The attention may have damaged the wider perception of her performance. The performance itself is competent professional work.
Ginger works both sides, Gabriel’s associate first and eventually Stanley’s ally, and Berry never lets either loyalty take over. I like her a lot in this. The character is never entirely trustworthy and never entirely treacherous, and Berry keeps me guessing about her longer than the script alone would have managed.
Berry’s career has been major across multiple decades. Monster’s Ball (2001), released the same year as Swordfish, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The two performances together show her range across considerably different tones. Swordfish works at action thriller tone. Monster’s Ball works at dramatic tone. Berry handled both productions with the right craft. The topless scene attention has overshadowed the Swordfish role. The performance itself deserves serious evaluation independent of the controversy.
The Dominic Sena Direction
Dominic Sena directed Swordfish after Kalifornia (1993) and Gone in 60 Seconds (2000). His career has been action filmmaking at commercial scale. Swordfish is one of his stronger productions. The visual approach integrates the music-video aesthetics Sena had developed in his earlier work with the conventional action filmmaking the screenplay required.
The hacking is where the film loses a little ground with me.
Hacking scenes in early-2000s cinema were generally embarrassing, and Swordfish gives Stanley the Vermondo cube, which he spins around to build a virus and which looks nothing like real computer work. It looks great on screen, and Sena clearly chose the cinematic over the documentary. I roll my eyes at it and keep watching.
The action sequences work with real intensity. The bus sequence. The car pursuit sequences. The bank robbery. The closing helicopter sequence. Each major action set piece works with real commercial tone. Sena handles the work at the level the screenplay requires. The film doesn’t reach the achievement level of contemporary work by directors like Christopher Nolan or Michael Mann, but it does reach the achievement level right for its commercial position.
For Writers
Swordfish withholds key information about the antagonist until the final sequences. The film introduces Gabriel as criminal in the first three acts. It reveals the intelligence officer underneath only at the climax. The structural choice produces specific dramatic effects on second viewings. The audience reads earlier scenes differently once they know what Gabriel is. The lesson for writers is that strategic withholding of information can produce content that rewards multiple viewings.
If your audience has all the information about your antagonist in the first act, your audience can evaluate the antagonist consistently across the runtime. If your audience receives the information gradually with reversals at the climax, your audience has to integrate the multiple readings. The integration is the work the film does on the audience. Swordfish commits to this technique with real discipline. The film rewards rewatching because the rewatching is when the integration becomes complete.
The Closing Sequence
The closing sequence reveals Gabriel’s actual operation. He’s been using the Swordfish funds to finance covert operations against terrorist organizations. The Department of Defense had created the slush fund decades earlier for this purpose. Successive administrations had abandoned the fund. Gabriel believes the fund should be reactivated for the purposes the Department of Defense originally created it to serve.
The reveal is the film’s structural payoff. The audience has been reading Gabriel as criminal throughout the runtime. The film reveals him as intelligence officer in the final sequences. The dual reading doesn’t contradict itself. Gabriel has been doing criminal things to accomplish what he believes are legitimate intelligence objectives. The film doesn’t commit to whether the objectives justify the methods. The audience supplies the moral judgment.
The Stanley character emerges from the operation with $10 million and his daughter’s custody.
The financial outcome is favorable. The personal cost is heavy. Stanley has participated in significant violence and real financial fraud. The film doesn’t punish him for the participation or celebrate it. The audience receives the outcome as institutional fact instead of as moral resolution.
The Ending
The film closes with Gabriel watching news coverage of his operation from a yacht in international waters. He’s escaped institutional capture. He’s continuing his work.
The closing implication is that the covert war Gabriel has been financing continues. The audience doesn’t learn whether Gabriel’s operations have produced positive outcomes for American national security, only that Gabriel believes they have.
The ending is bold. Gabriel is on a yacht watching the news, still working, and the film won’t tell me whether he’s a patriot or a monster. Most thrillers would have caught him or killed him so the audience could go home comfortable. Swordfish lets him go, and that’s the film keeping the promise its opening monologue made.
Craft: Among The Most Underrated Thrillers Of The 2000s
Craft Note
Swordfish works at high craft across multiple departments. The Travolta antagonist performance carries the structural mystery across two and a half acts. The Jackman lead performance grounds the technical material at professional restraint. The topless scene attention has overshadowed the Berry supporting performance, but the performance works at competent craft tone. The Cheadle, Jones, Shepard, and de Matteo supporting work provides suitable institutional context. The Sena direction handles the serious action requirements at commercial action tone.
It made money. The film made approximately $147 million worldwide on a $102 million budget. The critical reception was mixed, and the topless scene controversy considerably harmed it. Later reevaluation has gradually raised the film’s reputation. The opening monologue and the bus sequence are widely studied in action filmmaking contexts. The structural ambition has been recognized over time.
The 9 rating is what it earns. The film doesn’t reach 10 because the hacking material works at cinematic instead of documentary tone and because some of the dialogue dates unevenly. The structural and performance achievements remain considerable. Swordfish belongs in any serious thriller cinema conversation and deserves wider recognition than its initial reception had supported.
Is Swordfish as good as people say?
A 9 from me, and the only things keeping it from a 10 are the cartoon hacking and some dialogue that dates badly. Travolta’s villain, the monologue, the hostage explosion, the flying bus and Jackman keeping Stanley quiet all work at a level most reviewers in 2001 were too distracted by one scene to notice. I think Swordfish deserves a lot more respect than it ever got.
