Bad Movies

I guess the official protocol is to say: "Spoilers ahead!". However, I will be doing you a favor. Don't ever watch this movie: Swordfish. It's been a while since I sat through a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie. In a funny way....I feel a bit refreshed by it. No need for seriousness in thinking about this. No Nietzschian metaphors within the bad guys like The Dark Knight. No serious commentary on society's rejected ones as in Monster. No thought provoking commentary on the war in Iraq like In the Valley of Elah.
Nope! This movie is just so bad, it should be illegal to have "making of.." featurettes on the DVD like this one does. You know the ones, where the actors and others involved in this semi-crime against humanity talk up the movie like it's the next Citizen Kane. And the actors? Well...we're talking some of the best actors out there in this movie: John Travolta, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman and Don Cheadle. I guess when there's too many good actors, that should be a sign of some kind?

Apparently this movie is trying to make a STATEMENT about how terrorism is to be handled. You see the key is (I am not making this up): Hit them back harder!!!!! TAKE THAT! That's what settles for profound thinking in this movie. Travolta says that the first few pages of the script are what sold the film for him. Basically the movie begins with Travolta explaining what is wrong with Hollywood films. Big long attempt at Tarantino-esque dialogue. Kinda ironic - an incredibly bad movie talking about....but I guess that was unintentional. This movie is so bad that their idea of a chase scene involves actors rolling after each other down an incredibly steep hill. I'm not kidding - rolling down a hill. It was an excruciatingly long chase sequence, too. Really.

Travolta is posing as a bank robber in order to be a terrorist of terrorists (like Dexter, but poorly edited and with lots more explosions). He's supposed to be our American hero, although we just think he's really a crazy bad guy, but is Halle Berry a DEA agent or is she just his main squeeze after all and we get to see her topless for no other reason than guys can go around and say they saw her topless. That's the movie...a big long run-on sentence. Oh, and Travolta randomly kills people in the middle of LA and gets away with it. I guess that's not as much a stretch as I thought it was initially.

Anyhow - Berry's topless. However, the filmmakers don't seem to understand that in well made movies, there is a reason for things like toplessness or shooting up senators or blowing up LA. In this movie, there's really no reason for any of it. It's so choppily edited that it seems more like a highlight reel and a poorly made highlight reel at that. Now there was toplessness in In the Valley of Elah, too, but it made sense and revealed something about Tommy Lee Jones's character(No, he wasn't the one that was topless. Sorry, ladies.) I won't tell you about it because that would entail spoiling a good movie.

Another test of a bad movie suddenly came to mind: I bet everyone who saw Swordfish remembers that HB was topless for all of ten seconds or so. I also bet that everyone who saw In the Valley of Elah and has been reading this is thinking: "I don't remember any toplessness in that movie...." That's a sign of a good movie - even boobs don't distract from a well made film.