It's not for lack of trying. As the hacker in question, Hugh Jackman is given lots of sleek hardware to gaze at while tapping out staccato rhythms on computer keyboards. An anonymous blonde administers a blow job while he types. Improbably, he gets an on-screen graphics assist, showing how far he has to go before he racks up a new high score, cracking 128-bit, 256-bit, and finally 1,024-bit (oooh!) encryption.

Writer and co-producer Skip Woods may know something about computer security, but the movie's use of a lexicon of data-security terms feels like so much bullshit. It's a substitute, of course, for the kind of information-gathering and problem-solving that used to characterize the hard-boiled Hollywood thriller.

These days, of course, it's all about the special effects, and the whole of a movie amounts to the sum of its money shots. At the beginning of Swordish, the very nasty John Travolta character has taken over a bank, strapping explosives to the hostages he has trapped inside. Less than 10 minutes in, one of those explosive packs detonates, blowing a woman hostage into tiny bits along with it. The moment is fetishized to an extreme, with the motion frozen in time, debris (burning flesh? bone matter?) lovingly suspended in mid-air. The camera traces a loving arc around it in that post-Matrix style that flashes a movie's hip credentials. At the screening I saw, the audience burst into applause. At that moment, it was pretty obvious that the movie was going to be a total loss.

I don't blame the audience -- they were set up to adore that moment. It's director Dominic Sena who was so willing to compromise the moral universe of his film so early on. Given the imperative of getting a rise out of his audience, he throws a Christian to the lions in the first reel and waits for the crowd to roar its approval. If this movie even nodded perfunctorily toward its own dubious motives, as Gladiator did so effectively, I'd cut Sena some slack. But it's hard to dramatize such a pedestrian good-guys-versus-bad-guys yarn when you have your audience cheering banal evil out of the gate.

Evil in this case has the face of John Travolta, an increasingly hapless visage following the disaster of Battlefield Earth and the smaller-scale disappointment of Lucky Numbers, both last year. He plays Gabriel Shear, a criminal mastermind whose motives are intertwined with those of the U.S. government. Shear looks to Stanley (Jackman), a computer whiz whose security-busting exploits earned him a recently completed jail sentence, to help him gain access to some particularly stubborn systems.

As he proved in his debut as X-Men's Wolverine, Jackman can be a fairly commanding screen presence. But he just seems wrung-out this time around. His pretty face and boyish grin are exploited in purely generic fashion. His motivation is pretty bogus -- his ex-wife (Drea DeMatteo of The Sopranos) is a chain-smoking lush whose new boyfriend shoots porn flicks in her living room, and Stanley wants Gabriel's cash so he can mount a legal challenge to her custody of their daughter.

Despite that do-it-for-the-children undercurrent, Swordfish at least has the mildly satisfactory trimmings of your standard R-rated action movie, delivering a few interesting visuals (a bus carried through downtown L.A. via helicopter), a reasonably well-executed car chase and a modicum of sleaze appeal (Halle Berry's tits are not generated via computer, and Sena damn near fails to make them sexy).

I was less impressed by the aggressively stylish cinematography (Travolta delivers a long opening-credits monologue in deliberately shallow focus) and the formulaic, pseudo-political storyline. The lengthy, multiple-twist denouement, which includes an unlikely resurrection and leaves an opening for a sequel (producer Joel Silver is nothing if not an optimist), is patently unsatisfying, making Swordfish a dud even as summer firecrackers go.

Theatrical aspect ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic)
Screened at Loews Palisades Center, West Nyack, NY