- Title: USA: JOHN TRAVOLTA ATTENDS FILM PREMIERE OF HIS LATEST MOVIE "SWORDFISH"
- Date: 3rd June 2001
- Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (JUNE 4) (REUTERS) WIDE/ PAN OF EXTERIOR OF PREMIERE THEATER SCU MOVIE POSTER FOR SWORDFISH WIDE OF HUGH JACKMAN ARRIVING CUTAWAY TV CAMERAS/ PAN TO ARRIVALS SMV, HALLE BERRY ARRIVING AND POSING WIDE OF JOHN TRAVOLTA AND KELLY PRESTON DRIVING UP IN SPORTS CAR PAN FROM FILM POSTER TO TRAVOLTA AND PRESTON WALKING ACROSS TO JOEL SILVER VARIOUS, TRAVOLTA, PRESTON AND SILVER POSING SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) HUGH JACKMAN SAYING OF HIS COMPUTER WORK IN THE FILM, I had a guru, this guy called Rick Lipton, on set with me 24 hours a day explaining it, but ... JACKMAN'S WIFE SAYING At home, he's still battling the e-mail. HUGH JACKMAN SAYING Computer's equals frustration but more computer hackers as in what they do, how they think, who they're out with, what's going on. All that kind of stuff is more important for me. SCU/ SMV HALLE BERRY SPEAKING TO REPORTERS ALONG ARRIVAL LINE (2 SHOTS) SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) HALLE BERRY SAYING OF FINALLY DOING A NUDE SCENE, I've gotten great other offers to do nudity before but I wasn't in a place in my life where I felt comfortable, you know? I didn't have a loving, adoring husband that would support me in that choice. I didn't feel confident with me body or with my own womanhood, I think. And, now, this year, with all the things that have happened in the last couple of years in my life, I finally feel grown up and very in control. SMV, TRAVOLTA AND PRESTON ON ARRIVAL LINE WITH DON CHEADLE SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) JOHN TRAVOLTA SAYING It's just a little more fun to play a bad guy because you get a little more flair and style and panache to do it, but, you know, this guy, actually, at first, looks evil, but maybe, if you look a little harder, he might not be completely that way. He might even be good. WIDE OF FANS LINED UP TO SEE TRAVOLTA (2 SHOTS) WIDE OF TRAVOLTA AND OTHERS BEING INTERVIEWED
- Embargoed: 18th June 2001 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Usa
- Country: USA
- Reuters ID: LVADOM54RM6J1LFJ4AB65NR59B9D
- 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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