Movies - Swordfish

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	Movies - Swordfish

Swordfish (sometimes referred to as Password: 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. In the bank break-in, Gabriel's team is killed during the escape. Or are they?

The moral issues brought up by this film are especially poignant after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Some people however consider the film deeply cynical, though, as the supposedly good guys use hostage-taking as an integral part of their heist, brutalizing them in vivid scenes and causing several deaths.

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.
Halle Berry has stated 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 (although most of it is not very meaningful). At one point Hugh 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 Axel Torvalds appears early in the film, a pun on the Linux godfather Linus Torvalds.
The title comes from the 1932 Marx Brothers
movie, Horse Feathers
. Groucho and Chico 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 the third X-Men film to be released in 2006.

Tagline

"Log on. Hack in. Go anywhere. Steal everything."

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Swordfish (film) ]

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Movies - Swordfish

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