Swordfish - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Swordfish



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
For those of us who are 35 and older. Have you ever looked back at things you did, said, or thought back in your teens/20s and thought to yourself “wow! How did I ever think what I said/did was cool? I was so ignorant and must have looked like a doofus to adults”. Well, that’s basically what Swordfish was to me when I pulled out this review disc after almost 14 years between this and my last viewing. Back in 2001 I was a 19 year old college student who went with his best friend to go see this in theaters. Back then I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread, after watching Hugh Jackman blow up after X-Men. Travolta was an awesome bad guy (coming off the stench that was Battlefield Earth the year before) and everything about the movie was just “cool”. Now I’m sitting here with my jaw hanging down to my knees wondering why I ever thought this was one of the best action movies of the time period.

Huge Jacked Man (errrr… Hugh Jackman) is paroled computer hacker extraordinaire Stanley Dobson, who is living in a trailer down in Texas after having served an 18 month stint for breaking into the FBI database. His life has sort of fallen apart, with his ex wife having taken his daughter Holly (Camryn Grimes, who would grow up to star on The Days of Our Lives) from him to live with her and her “adult film producer” husband out in California. Approached by seductress Ginger (Halle Berry), Stanley is offered something he can’t refuse. An offer to meet her boss to talk about a computer job, and even if he declined, the ex-con would get $100K.

Tempted into the offer in order to gain custody of his daughter, Stanley heads out to California to meet this mysterious boss Gabriel (John Travolta), only to be given the offer of a lifetime. Break his parole and hack into a bank’s security system to gain access to over $9 billion in misappropriated CIA funds, and he not only gets to play with the coolest computers on earth, but he gets a cool $10 million in the bank when all is said and done. But the longer the job goes on, the more Stanely realizes what kind of men he’s actually working for, and what the actual job entails vs. what he was sold.

Swordfish comes out swinging hard and heavy, utilizing the early 2000s trope of having one of the end scenes of the film open up the movie, and then leans HARD into all that early 2000s cheese. Frosted tips, club music, that little gold hoop in the left ear for the guys, and dialog that would make even Ewe Boll cringe at times. But what really makes this film work, or not work really, is the Houdini like twists and turns that it utilizes to set up the finale. Everything is telegraphed a mile away, with the viewer able to guess most of the ending before we’re 2/3rds of the way through. But the movie somehow, inexplicably, seems to just work for me. I was laughing the entire way through the film, but by the time the credit rolled I was grinning from ear to ear.

Travolta is in peak form here, giving us his early 2000s scene eating nature, just slathering up the entire screen with his hamfisted dialog and over the top villain persona. Think of him like a more suave version of Howard Saint from The Punisher, blended with his secret agent in From Paris with Love. Jackman is the up and coming star here after X-Men, and he does solid with what he’s given, but WOW, he most certainly can’t pull off the hacker bit here. But then again, that may be more to do with the movie writers using late 90s hacker tropes and not giving him a lot to work with. As a computer science major back in college I caught some of the faux pas, but looking back after 24 years of experience, the hacking lingo was SOOOOOOO incredibly bad (they could have talked about changing polarity on the phase couplers, or venting plasma from the aft nacells and it would have made just as much sense). Halle Berry was OK as Ginger, but lets face it. We’re all here simply for that poolside scene, and the scene with the wire. I mean, that’s pretty much what the entire world was talking about in 2001, wasn’t it?




Rating:

Rated R for violent images and some sexuality




4K Video: Video

Arrow’s remaster is nothing short of spectacular, absolutely blowing away the 2008 Warner/New Line Blu-ray that we’ve had up until this point by a goodly margin. According to the information from the insert booklet, it looks like Dark City was scanned at 4K over at Warner’s MPI facility, while scanning in the director’s cut scenes at 2K, to be spliced in and upscaled for the director’s cut disc. Not only that, but the Director of Photography approved the entire remaster.

Whatever the case, Arrow’s results speak for themselves, as this is just a fabulous experience on screen. Dark City is an aesthetic treat to begin with, and the new 4K scan does wonders for the film. I was always a bit frustrated by Warner’s Blu-ray, with its use of the inefficient VC-1 codec, the DNR and compression that went along with it, and the dulled colors. This new 4K UHD looks light years better, with a more precise color timing, and the incredible amount of details that are present. I honestly have never seen this so clean and clear. It’s a 35mm film with all of the lovely grain that crops up during dark sequences (and the ENTIRE film is bathed in darkness), but said grain is so fine and unobtrusive that it almost fades from your conscious viewing. You can literally see every fiber on Jennifer Connelly’s green dress, down to the lines and curves of her face. Heck, I never realized that you could see the peach fuzz on her face until I watched this version. Even the newly minted Blu-ray from Arrow doesn’t show that much.

The color palette is a bit grim and green/blue for the most part, with dark patches of sterile stone structures to complement it. Faces are a bit more parchment colored for the most part, but the light of the nightclub provides more natural skin hues, as well as the last few moments out in the sun near Shell Beach. Otherwise, it’s very pale, very green/blue, and accented by amber highlights due to the dim street lighting. The HDR/DV application adds a lot of punch to the colors, even though the heavy color grading would suggest that they wouldn’t. Proyas intentionally allowed the reds, greens, and other primary shades to pop against the grim background, and comparing against the Blu-ray, they look so rich and well saturated that it made the hairs on the back of my arms stand up. This is simply a gorgeous-looking remaster that is worth the price of admission alone.







Audio:

In line with the weak VC-1 codec, the old Blu-ray sported a 5.1 Dolby Digital lossy track in (640kbps), so seeing that Arrow upgraded this to a DTS-HD MA 5.1 track is just fine. The 5.1 track is very solid, but not exactly a show stopper. Something that is likely due to the sound design itself, as it has always been a bit light in the bass and surrounds department, even back in the DVD loudness wars days. The track has to be boosted about 3 DB over normal, but when aligned with reference, the track sounds quite nice. As mentioned, the bass and the surrounds aren’t always crazy active, but they still have plenty to do throughout the film. Surrounds are mostly relegated to ambient noise, while the bass is pretty reserved except during the shootout/car chase with the belt fed machine gun, or the helicopter escape scene at the end. THOSE two scenes really are rousing and full of pep. The rest of the time (even during the bomb blast at the beginning) the bass is kinda midrange. The majority of the heavy lifting is done in the front of the room, with the mains taking up the slack and the dialog being firmly planted in the front of the room. It’s not a GREAT track, but the 5.1 mix is still more than good. It’s just hampered by the original sound design, as my DVD, my Blu-ray, and now the 4K UHD seem to have the same audio master, just with different levels of lossy/lossless.






Extras:

• Audio commentary by director Dominic Sena
• Soundtrack Hacker, a brand new interview with composer Paul Oakenfold
• How to Design a Tech Heist, a brand new interview with production designer Jeff Mann
• HBO First Look: Swordfish, a promotional behind-the-scenes featurette
• Effects in Focus: The Flying Bus, a promotional featurette detailing how the film's iconic climactic scene was created
• Planet Rock Club Reel, a music video by the film's co-composer Paul Oakenfold
• Swordfish: In Conversation, a promotional featurette with interviews from cast and crew members including actors Hugh Jackman, John Travolta, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle and Sam Shepard, director Dominic Sena, and producer Joel Silver
• Two alternate endings
• Theatrical trailer

Physical Swag
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket
• Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Priscilla Page and an article from American Cinematographer about the film's opening sequence

Final Score: ​

Looking back in time, Swordfish is one of those guilty early 2000’s era pleasures that may not entertain as much as it did when it came out. But I don’t care, I still love the film for all its cheesy stupidity, and just have to tell myself that just because it’s a cheesy movie, doesn’t mean it can’t hit the spot. Just like Taco Bell on a Saturday when the wife is away. Arrow has done a fantastic job with the 4K UHD, though, with amazing video and an upgrade from the original Dolby Digital lossy track that Warner put on the Blu-ray back in 2008. Extras are actually really solid, and overall this is a fun release for those of us who love schlocky early 2000s action movies.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Vinnie Jones
Directed by: Dominic Sena
Written by: Skip Woods
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DTS-HD MA 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Arrow
Rated: R
Runtime: 100 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: June 10th, 2025

Recommendation: Fun, CHEESY, Watch