Swordfish

Ridiculous but occasionally fun, which is more than can be said for Pearl Harbor. Don’t expect to find any recognizable human beings among the characters, but there are at least two fabulous movie starsJohn Travolta as the villain, Halle Berry as the double (or triple, or quadruple) agentand a fashionable Aussie (Hugh Jackman) as the hero, a hacker who breaks encryptions the way Schwarzenegger cracks walnuts. We also get Don Cheadle as an FBI agent and Sam Shepard as a corrupt senator. Also, this being coproduced by Joel Silver, there are all the car explosions you could hope for. The limited but unmistakable wit of Skip Woods’s screenplay hinges in part on trying to conjure up a secret organization that sounds sillier than the FBI or CIA, while Dominic Sena, the music-video specialist who brought us the Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, does a better job this time of directing absurdity in a diverting manner. 99 min. (JR) Read more