Hey, remember this movie? Me either! You kids today may not know this, but back in the late 90s-early 00s, we were terrified of technology. Between Y2K and this new-fangled thing called "hacking" people were simultaneously intrigued and scared shitless. And that has been History with Lucy. You're welcome.Stanley (Hugh Jackman) is a convicted hacker who has been forbidden to ever touch a computer again. He's mostly content working an undefined blue-collar job somewhere in Texas when he is approached by Ginger (Halle Berry), a mysterious and beautiful woman offering him a ton of money to meet with her super-rich, super-insane boss, Gabriel (John Travolta). Gabriel needs a hacker to break in to a government slush fund and siphon off over $9 billion to fund some bizarre shadow war with international terrorists. Seriously. And he's willing to kill multiple American hostages as a smokescreen so the FBI agent (Don Cheadle) chasing him doesn't figure out the big picture.
I can't even begin to unpack the mentality of a lone billionaire declaring war on the rest of the world and being totally unencumbered by a checks and balance system.
So we're just going to leave that out and talk about the rest of the movie. I don't want to say that this is the tipping point for John Travolta's career slide into irrelevancy. I haven't put any research into his filmography. I will say that this is when I totally wrote him off. All I remember about when this movie came out was the buzz that Halle Berry --who had refused for years-- would be topless. And then there was a collective "eh" *shrug* afterwards. When it came out, it was flashy, had a lot of star power, and Hugh Jackman was still relatively unknown. Now, fifteen years later, it's practically unwatchable. Like, Showgirls levels of over-acting, bad dialogue, and taking itself seriously. Avoid.
I won't lie...I didn't even have this movie on my RADAR until I saw a blurb about how much Halle Berry got paid to be topless in this movie. So, I saw it when it hit the theater. And yeah, it was crap, but, a Matinée showing was only $5 at the time, so, I paid about $2.50 per Halle Berry B-Cup. The plot overall was super dumb. I was 20 or so when I saw it, and I had some knowledge of computer security back then, and I was just dumbfounded that the movie got made at all. Hugh Jackman handled his role about as well as he handled being Wolverine in X-Men, so, his performance was good in my opinion, but he had a lot more to lose. He had only done the one hit role at that point. Don Cheadle is even decent in the movie, but Travolta and Berry were either hamming it up or phoning it in. The plot in general, I agree, is just stupid, and I think if the Master Hacker role had gone to anyone else but Jackman, it would have been totally forgettable.
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