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 in your teens or 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 since my last viewing. Back in 2001, I was a 19-year-old college student who went with his best friend to 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 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 by the offer 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 Stanley 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 dialogue that would make even Ewe Boll cringe at times. But what 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 credits 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 dialogue 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 solidly 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 let's 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

Swordfish was one of those EARLY Warner Bros discs from the start of the format war, and was sporting a low-bitrate VC-1 encode back then. Luckily for us, Arrow has given us a brand new 4K scan from the OCN, and it looks amazing in comparison. The new 4K master from the 35mm negative sparkles, with tons of fine details and amazing textures that I never realized were in the film from watching the ancient Blu-ray disc. Check out the scene in the coffee shop at the beginning where Travolta is waxing eloquent about Dog Day Afternoon. You can see every bit of razor burn and five o’clock shadow on his face that was never there before. Or the darkness in the basement of his lair, where Gabriel’s crew is preparing for the freeway trip with the bus. Black levels are great, with wonderful HDR highlights that keep those blacks silky and deep. Not to mention that heavy green and sepia color grading pops even more. The Blu-ray had a hard time realizing detail levels with that massive color grading (seriously, it’s so green at times that it rivals the Blu-ray of The Matrix, and the sepia was as thick as Kalifornia). I remember the original Blu-ray was pretty DNR’d, as there wasn’t much grain in that transfer. But for this one, there is a nice, organic layer of grain that just complements the film’s aesthetic perfectly. My only reason for not giving this a 5/5 is due to a few quirks, such as the horizontal strips at the 18:30-18:45 section of the film, and a couple of scenes just look a tad soft. Otherwise, this is an absolutely amazing upgrade from the Blu-ray.







Audio:

In line with the weak VC-1 codec, the old Blu-ray featured 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 showstopper. Something likely due to the sound design itself, as it has always been a bit light in the bass and surround 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 M249 SAW, 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 dialogue 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 2000s 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