Password: Swordfish

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Movie
German title Password: Swordfish
Original title Swordfish
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2001
length approx. 96 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Dominic Sena
script Skip Woods
production Joel Silver , Bruce Berman
music Christopher Young ,
Paul Oakenfold
camera Paul Cameron
cut Stephen E. Rivkin
occupation

Password: Swordfish (Original title: Swordfish ) is a film directed by Dominic Sena and shot in the United States in 2001. The subtitle is: Hacking in. Log in. Sniffing around. Rip off. (Originally: Log on. Hack in. Go anywhere. Steal everything. ). The film belongs to the thriller or heist movie genre and is characterized by sometimes surprising turns of the plot. John Travolta , Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry star in this action thriller in which a genius computer hacker is pressured.

action

The convicted computer hacker Stanley Jobson, who is never allowed to touch a computer again, is recruited by the gangster Gabriel Shear to commit a theft using his computer skills. Shear uses Jobson's daughter Holly, who lives with her mother and with whom he is no longer allowed to have contact, as leverage. With the offered fee of 10 million US dollars, Jobson should be able to pay the best lawyers to obtain custody of his daughter. For this sum, he has to create a computer worm with which Shear wants to steal $ 9.5 billion - money that the DEA drug police have confiscated and that is now in an account at the World Bank .

Jobson gets to work. After a while he realizes that Shear is the leader of an organization that uses the money to finance and carry out assassinations. According to Shear, however, these serve the good of the United States and are directed against terrorists hostile to the country. Jobson gets closer to Ginger, Shear's assistant, and learns from her that she is a DEA agent on the undercover mission. He also discovers a body that looks like Shear in a cold store. He keeps this knowledge to himself, however, especially when he realizes that he is being shadowed by JT Roberts, the FBI agent and who had hunted him down in the past. Roberts tells him that another hacker named Axl Torvalds was murdered by Shear after police arrested him at the airport.

Behind Shear's group, unnoticed by the public, is Senator Reisman, who gives Shear the orders. Now that the FBI has become aware of Shear, the Senator wants to cancel the project and have Shear removed. However, he escapes and in turn murders Reisman. Shear's prey is on a World Bank server , but it cannot be attacked from the outside. So Shear and his team storm the building and take those present hostage, after kidnapping Jobson's daughter Holly and murdering her mother. Jobson has to install his worm, which transfers the money to Shears accounts. However, Jobson has manipulated the worm in such a way that it transfers the money to a different account every 60 seconds, thereby depriving Shears of access. This function should actually only be triggered later, as soon as Jobson and his daughter are safe. Jobson manages to get Holly to safety, but Shear threatens to kill Ginger, forcing Jobson to deactivate the worm and transfer the money to one of Shears' accounts in Monte Carlo . In this way he saves Ginger at first, but Shear shoots her shortly afterwards, knowing that she has worked for the other side.

The group flees, pursued by the police, with some hostages in a bus towards the airport. In order to leave the pursuers behind, Shear has organized a cargo helicopter that lifts the bus while it is in motion and transports it to the roof of a skyscraper, where the actual escape helicopter is waiting. When Shear and his people take off, Jobson shoots down the helicopter with a rocket launcher. Jobson is later supposed to identify Shears' body in forensic medicine, but has to realize that the dead body is the body from the cold room. He remembers that shortly before the escape helicopter took off, some people left the roof of the high-rise building using an escape staircase. However, since he has now received his share of the booty, he keeps it to himself and drives away with his daughter Holly.

A short time later, Ginger, who is obviously also not dead, has the transferred money transferred to other accounts in Monaco . Then she drives away in a boat with Shear. The news reports of a fatal attack on a terrorist leader apparently instigated by Shear.

Trivia

  • The Finnish hacker (played by the German actor Rudolf Martin ), who is arrested at Los Angeles Airport, speaks High German instead of Finnish with an accent-free standard in the original English version. He has a Finnish and a German passport with him. The hacker is named Axl Torvalds in the film , a reference to the Finnish programmer and father of Linux, Linus Torvalds .
  • The manufacturer of the car that Gabriel drives in the film, TVR , received around 50 requests a day after the film was released, asking where the car could be bought in the USA. This car, the TVR Tuscan , is not registered in the USA because it does not comply with the emission regulations there.
  • Originally, Halle Berry's first topless scene was intended to attract attention. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , however, the scene in which a bus hanging from a helicopter brushes against a high-rise became the focus. Due to the attacks, the cinema release in Germany was also postponed.
  • The title of the film is a Marx Brothers sketch from the film Flowering nonsense ( Horse Feathers removed) in which Groucho attempts to a speakeasy to gain access. The skit ends with the doorman Chico having to guess the password "Swordfish" in order to be granted entry by Groucho.
  • The account to be robbed was worth $ 400 million in 1986, and 15 years later it was $ 9.5 billion. That means the interest rate would have to be around 23.5% p. a. be.
  • IP addresses above 315. *. *. * Are shown in the computer scenes . The largest possible IPv4 address is 255.255.255.255.
  • According to the film store, the bank at the end of the film is in Monaco. In the opening scene, however, the EU flag and a French flag can be seen on the bank building. In the director's commentary you learn that the scene was actually shot in France.
  • The helicopter that carries the bus through the air is a Sikorsky S-64 .

criticism

"Effectively staged thriller which, with increasing duration, loses sight of the emotional foundation of its story and in the end owes its functionality solely to the performance of the actors."

- Lexicon of international film

The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.

Awards

John Travolta received a 2002 Golden Raspberry nomination in the Worst Actor category for his portrayals in Deadly Trust and Password: Swordfish .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for password: Swordfish . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , November 2005 (PDF; test number: 88 261 DVD).
  2. ↑ Password: Swordfish. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 15, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. ↑ Deadly Trust (2001) Awards. In: IMDb. Retrieved January 21, 2017 .