Story
The film begins in a restaurant in Los Angeles where a man (John Travolta) discusses Dog Day Afternoon before walking off, with numerous SWAT officers pointing guns at him and a dishevelled man (Hugh Jackman) following him out. They walk to a nearby building with gunmen and hostages strapped with bombs and ball-bearings. One of the gunmen is killed by a sniper; when the hostage is forcibly taken away, the explosives detonate via a proximity trigger, killing her and others. The film then flashes back four days.
Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) is a hacker who infected the FBI's Carnivore program with a potent computer virus, delaying its deployment by several years. For this, he was arrested by Agent Roberts (Don Cheadle), convicted of computer crimes and spent two years in Leavenworth. A condition of his parole is that he is forbidden from touching, much less using, a computer. His ex-wife, Melissa (Drea de Matteo), has sole custody over their daughter Holly and a restraining order against Stanley from seeing Holly.
While Stanley is at home (a trailer in rural Texas) practicing his golf swing, Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) shows up to solicit his hacking skills for her boss Gabriel Shear (John Travolta). Stanley is apparently recruited at the last minute as a replacement for Gabriel's first choice, Axl Torvalds (Rudolf Martin), a Finnish hacker of exceptional talent who was arrested by authorities at the airport. Torvalds is later assassinated by Gabriel's men before he can divulge anything about his assignment and who hired him to Agent Roberts. For an initial $100,000, Stanley agrees to meet with Gabriel. He and Ginger fly to Los Angeles and meet Gabriel in a night club. Gabriel pressures Stanley right then and there to hack a government system in 60 seconds while simultaneously being held at gunpoint by Gabriel's bodyguard and right hand man, Marco (Vinnie Jones) and receiving fellatio from a young woman (Laura Lane). Although it was just a test (the gun was not loaded) Stanley succeeded in hacking the system, a feat that Gabriel had not anticipated.
At Gabriel's house he offers Stanley $10 million to write a worm that steals money from a secret government slush fund to the order of $9.5 billion. Gabriel reveals to Stanley that he works for an organization called the Black Cell that was started by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, which is responsible for retaliatory attacks against terrorists who have attacked Americans. It is currently headed by Senator Reisman (Sam Shepard), who discovers that the FBI has caught onto Gabriel and attempts to pull the plug. After Gabriel refuses to terminate his plans, Reisman attempts to have Gabriel killed, which fails. Gabriel tracks the Senator down while he is fly fishing in Bend, Oregon and kills him.
Gabriel proceeds with his plan and raids the local branch of the WorldBanc. He takes hostages, puts explosives on them and deploys Stanley's worm. After stealing the $9.5 billion he boards the hostages and his crew on a bus out of the WorldBanc. Gabriel demands a plane at the local airport (a hostage negotiation cliché) but it was a diversion. An S-64 Aircrane swoops down, lifts the bus and releases it on the rooftop of a skyscraper. From the rooftop, Gabriel seemingly departs with his team in a helicopter, which Stanley shoots down with a rocket-propelled grenade. At the morgue, Stanley and Agent Roberts learn that the body recovered from the helicopter is that of a former Mossad agent named Gabriel Shear, revealing that the "true" Gabriel Shear is still alive.
The end of the film shows Ginger and Gabriel in Monte Carlo transferring the $9.5 billion into other accounts. The final scene shows a yacht being destroyed while Ginger and Gabriel look on in a smaller boat while a news anchor voice narrates that a suspected terrorist died on that yacht, the third such successful counter-terrorism operation in as many weeks.
Read more about this topic: Swordfish (film)
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“One story recounts that a Tennessean, after a single day in the then almost impenetrable tangle of cypress, briars, and canebreaks, pestered by myriads of mosquitoes, and bogged in the heavy gumbo mud, declared: “Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died—I want none of it.””
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Come all you rounders if you want to hear
A story ‘bout a brave engineer;
Casey Jones, that was the rounder’s name
On a heavy eight-wheeler he rode to fame.”
—Unknown. Casey Jones (l. 1–4)
“I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)