- Title: USA: JOHN TRAVOLTA ATTENDS FILM PREMIERE OF HIS LATEST MOVIE "SWORDFISH"
- Date: 3rd June 2001
- Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (JUNE 1) (REUTERS) SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) JOHN TRAVOLTA SAYING OF HIS COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE, I just learned what I needed to learn for the movie and Hugh Jackman definitely became a geek for his part. But I actually hired Hugh Jackman to figure this stuff out so that's really why, you know, I get the break on that. SCU (SOUNDBITE)
- Embargoed: 18th June 2001 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Usa
- Country: USA
- Reuters ID: LVA8JLDOALTH1O4E9T2HK6CBCBWC
- Story Text: It's comeback time again for John Travolta, who's following up last year's back-to-back bombs "Battlefield Earth" and "Lucky Numbers" with a big action cyber-thriller called "Swordfish." Travolta attended the film's world premiere in Los Angeles.
The film starts with Travolta sitting in a coffee shop delivering a riff on movies. "You know what the problem with Hollywood is? It makes s---," he says in a moment. He then proceeds to praise "Dog Day Afternoon" and Al Pacino's performance in it while adding that the film didn't go far enough and that its hostage-taking plot would play out entirely differently in the current instant-news era.
Travolta's character, Gabriel Shear, soon is revealed to be the perpetrator of a bank heist himself. He and his crew have wrapped 22 hostages in dynamite and ball bearings, SWAT troops and TV cameras are everywhere, and an amazing climactic shot of an explosion, a lateral camera move with carnage seemingly floating in mid-air, will leave auds gasping and anticipating a "Matrix"-like flight from reality.
Gradually, the picture moves from cyberthriller space to more conventional action territory. With the resolution of the hostage crisis left hanging, the film flips back four days to the airport apprehension, and mysterious murder while under FBI interrogation, of a notorious international computer hacker. At the same time, Ginger (Halle Berry), a cohort of Gabriel's whose status is equally inscrutable, travels to Texas to "recruit" Stanley Jobson (Jackman), the world's former No. 1 hacker, now an ex-con forbidden to see his daughter or so much as touch a computer.
The first meeting between Stanley and swaggering Gabriel.
takes place in a private room of a bimbo-festooned nightclub where Gabriel toys with the bewildered Stanley by having a blonde begin to service him, telling a goon to hold him at gunpoint and ordering him to penetrate a difficult Dept. of Defense computer file within 60 seconds. This combination of elements is not only physically contradictory, if not impossible, but is crude and off-putting, sensational for sensationalism's sake.
Somehow, Stanley passes this test, making him eligible to earn $10 million by helping Gabriel in an unspecified dark task that involves cracking a government file containing billions in laundered drug money. Although suspicious of Gabriel's true motives, Stanley signs on, mainly on the promise of being reunited with his daughter.
Like all great movie hackers, Stanley hates his FBI nemesis Roberts (Don Cheadle) for having arrested him years back, and is thrown when he spots Gabriel's apparent girlfriend Ginger with a wire running through her lingerie, prompting a suspicious admission from her that she's really a DEA agent. It's just one of her numerous deliberate provocations.
Gabriel's intentions, allegiances and moral status are all a secret. Obsessively devoted to the cause of fighting international terrorism, Gabriel has adopted a terrorist's ruthless methodology in the process, thinking nothing of sacrificing lives for what he deems the greater good, an attitude he shares with a U.S. senator (Sam Shepard) with whom he later has a violent falling-out.
Jackman is a vigorous, anxiety-ridden Everyman who just happens to be a computer genius. "I just learned what I needed to learn for the movie and Hugh Jackman definitely became a geek for his part," Travolta told Reuters. "But I actually hired Hugh Jackman to figure this stuff out so that's really why, you know, I get the break on that." Coincidentally, with this film and "X-Men," Berry and Jackman have now appeared in four films together.
"Swordfish" opens in North American theatres on June 8. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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