HERE’S how Netflix describes the 2001 film Swordfish: “A mysterious radical hires the Mozart of government hacking. Forget good and evil: These cats live by their own codes.”
It sounds innocuous enough, right? It even sounds fun in a cheesy way. What it doesn’t do is let on that the film got panned by critics, or that Swordfish was known in 2001 as that action movie where Halle Berry goes topless.
Let’s get this out of the way: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with nudity. However, in 2001, there was a pervasive icky-ness in the air around Berry’s choice to partake in a topless scene in Swordfish.
At the time, it was widely reported that Berry initially didn’t want to do the scene, but that producers offered her a $US500,000 pay increase to do it — making her full Swordfish salary top out at $US2.5 million.
EW reported at the time that Swordfish producer Joel Silver said that the scene was “cool for the character and good for the box office”. Director Dominic Sena quipped that the exact sum broke down to “$250,000 per breast”. Halle Berry has repeatedly said that this story is incorrect, and that Sena was merely joking. Whether Berry’s per-boob bonus was a snide rumour or not, it’s part of the film’s pop culture legacy, and it was most definitely used to promote the film.
And what of the topless scene in question? It’s plopped right at the end of the film’s first act and is as unnecessary as gratuitous nude scenes come. Hugh Jackman’s Stan wakes up in his new employers’ lush digs and stumbles out towards the pool. There, Berry’s character Ginger is sunbathing with a book. She flips the book down so Stan, and the audience, can get a clear view of her topless. She’s nonchalant about it, but he acts visibly awkward. And then the scene is over.
You could argue that the moment communicates Ginger’s coolness, that she’s confident about her body and is using her sexuality to frazzle Stan. You could even say it’s a moment of satire, designed to point out the shallowness of gratuitous nudity in high octane thrillers. The problem is Swordfish isn’t a smart enough movie to pull either trick off.
Swordfish is a bad movie. It opens on John Travolta’s cartoonish villain Gabriel giving a meta monologue about the lack of realism in movies. Within minutes, the first female character we see is blown up on camera. (No, really, she’s blown up.) The rest of the film is a nonsensical riff on hacker thrillers, video games and old school noir. Nothing in the plot makes sense, the hacking doesn’t look real, and the gender politics of this film are beyond problematic. At one point, Hugh Jackman’s character is forced to hack into a system while a nameless blond performs unwanted oral sex on him — and when he asks her to stop — a gun is put to his head. It’s beyond bizarre, and if the film’s characters had anything resembling an interior life, it would be completely upsetting.
But what’s really upsetting about Swordfish is the squandered potential.
Every time Jackman and Berry share the screen, there’s the snap and hiss of something trying to spark to life. Both actors are giving us their best takes on noir archetypes. He’s the cynical, washed-up crook pulled back into one last big job. She’s the smirking femme fatale, all secrets and curves. The two of them are good! Their dialogue is clunky and the direction is bad, but Jackman and Berry crackle with charisma. Imagine what they could have done with a smart, meaty crime thriller.
This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission.
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