© 2006 William Ahearn

If you’re making a film full of overblown nonsense, you shouldn’t start it off by having the main character, Gabriel Shear (John Travolta), riffing on Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon.” Seeing the Lumet flick just days before seeing “Swordfish,” only reinforced my feelings that “Dog Day” is one of my favorite on-location New York City films.

“Swordfish” is, at heart, a heist flick with a twist. It’s the story of Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman), a recently paroled hacker who gets sucked into a heist via Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) to rob over a billion dollars that the DEA put into banks and then forgot about. Shear then uses heist money to assassinate terrorists working against the United States.

Which is too bad because the film touches on issues that would have made a far more engaging movie. How many “innocents” would you kill to provide security for your country? (Innocent is a moral value and not a tactical or strategic term, hence the quotes.) It could be argued that security can never be assured and there is no need to “sacrifice” anyone and it could be argued that killing any number of terrorists would save any number of civilians.

All of that gets lost beneath the car chases and shootouts between the central casting good guys and cartoon bad guys. The computer cracking is straight out of “Hackers” and the action sequences are the usual Hollywood silliness. Even the idea of using of the term “Swordfish” is a lift. “Swordfish” was a password used by Groucho Marx in “Horse Feathers” to get into a speakeasy. It was also used in “The Net” and “Hackers.”

Could have been a very interesting film.