Director Dominic Sena, moving up from Gone in Sixty Seconds, puts everything you're supposed to see and hear on the screen and makes you believe enough of it while it's happening that you won't have serious vague moments until you leave the theater.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 7, 2023

Swordfish is made with demonstrable skill and enthusiasm, and it's so improbable in its particulars that most viewers in the mood to do so will be able to kick back and enjoy it as shoot-'em-up entertainment.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 31, 2018

Cool explosions are the best thing here.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2010

Good pacing and intriguing characters drive the overflowing testosterone blitz to an above average level of fun.

| Original Score: B | Jul 21, 2009

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2008

It's a good thing the action is noisily distracting, because you don't want any down-time in which to ponder the plausibility, or the sense, of anything that is happening.

| Nov 1, 2007

A techno thriller that suffers from narrative shortcomings but is elevated by the star power of John Travolta and Halle Berry and particularly Aussie actor Hugh Jackman who's bound to become a Hollywood star.

| Original Score: C | Dec 1, 2006

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 6, 2005

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 30, 2005

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 8, 2003

Strap yourself in for the ride and enjoy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 1, 2003

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 10, 2003

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 8, 2003

It calls itself a 'thriller,' apparently because it is loaded with pointless machinations that pile up into a tortured wreck of narrative desperation.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 7, 2003

Some explosions, a lot of techno, two X-Men, and a Sweat-hog.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2002

Jaded, cynical, dumb and degenerate.

| Nov 10, 2002

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 30, 2002

...plays out like Jerry Bruckheimer's table scraps-- going through the motions in a clueless fog of market-research statistics and demographic pandering.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2002

Trite and overdone and undercooked and thrown together and ridiculous and wasteful.

| Original Score: 0.5/5 | Jul 20, 2002

[An] incredibly convoluted and ponderous techno-thriller that does little but showcase fast fading star John Travolta at his most staggeringly ineffectual.

| Original Score: short | Feb 21, 2002