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88A souped-up roadster of a film, a relentless action flick that looks great and moves with more grace and speed than seems possible.
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75A good movie? Hardly. But more than enough to pass a dog day afternoon.
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63It's skillfully mounted and fitfully intriguing, but weaves such a tangled web that at the end I defy anyone in the audience to explain the exact loyalties and motives of the leading characters.
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63The liveliest and most engaging time killer to come out of Hollywood in a long while. It's junk, to be sure, but it is superbly made junk.
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60If you like stuff breaking in THX, Swordfish delivers like no other this year. Bring earplugs.
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50So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.
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50So much luck is pressed with an absurdly overblown finale that 60 seconds will likely be Swordfish's shelf life after a couple of noisy opening weekends.
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50A high-impact, high-powered mess that raises the bar for over-the-topness.
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50The action is constant, often pointless, definitely gratuitous, and breathlessly fun.
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50A slick, cynical, nasty piece of heist-film plotting that hides its more obvious logical gaps in techno-babble and distracting spectacles of wanton violence and big explosions.
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50A half-absorbing, half-ridiculous techno-thriller that often goes too far in search of audience-rousing effects.
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50Ridiculous but occasionally fun.
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42Jinxed itself into being nothing but an inane popcorn flick pretending to be edgy.
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40Swordfish is exactly the kind of nominally high-octane actioner that breeds legions of apologists who will encourage you to "check your brain at the door" before seeing it.
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40Noisy and obnoxious, this flashy action picture is so hell-bent on seeming smart that it fairly forces you to think about how fundamentally stupid it is.
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40Feels like every other action thriller we've seen in the past three years, only it's more annoying -- and, in some cases, more appalling -- because it's trying so hard to distinguish itself.
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40Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.
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40By the third big climax the audience started to get impatient with the movie's pointless zigs and zags.
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38Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.
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38It's hard to say with certainty whether it's insufficient plot or insufficient interpretation that's responsible for Travolta's waxwork performance.
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30The story -- is just what fills in the gaps between slow-motion fireballs, Matrix-style frozen mayhem, and Halle Berry's notoriously undraped breasts.
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25It's a film that reeks of stupidity and cynicism, one that makes you feel soiled just to have sat through it.
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25This lurid thriller comes to life in fits and starts, and then sinks into the bog of its own cleverness once again.
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20Exhibits rank incompetence on every level.
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20John, John, John -- one more bad-guy role in a bad movie and you're going to need another comeback.
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20A kind of dirty fairy tale in which people with nasty attitudes inhabit a trash-talking, macho world of fast cars and complaisant women.
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20Turns into a meticulously choreographed bang-by-the-numbers action fantasy that I would accuse of peddling evil if the film weren't so dumb and incoherent.
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20Nutty paranoid thriller.
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20An ugly exercise in big-budget carnage.
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20An action opera designed to elicit Beavis and Butt-head-level appreciation.
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20Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.
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12About 45 minutes into Swordfish, the picture degenerates permanently from drivel to sleaze (only a short drop).
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10The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 27
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Mixed: 3 out of 27
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Negative: 4 out of 27
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[Anonymous]6
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FrankO.5A convoluted plot that I did not understand, waste of good talent on this flick... a nice rental but I would not pay full price to see it.