A deplorable high-tech, high-impact, high-explosive thriller, the opening lines of which -- "You know, the problem with Hollywood is they make shit. Unbelievable, unremarkable shit" -- apparently hope to summon up some preventative voodoo. Or hope at the very least to beat you to the punch. The movie at its outset fosters the image of an omnipotent, sybaritic, don't-you-wish-you-were-me crime lord, equally unfazed at blowing an innocent hostage into a million bits and at gunning down a U.S. Senator in cold blood. (John Travolta, sporting a tobacco-juice dribble of a beard down his chin, seems no longer willing or able to play anything straight ever since Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty went to his head.) Then, after a neck-wrenching plot turn, and after a couple of glib rhetorical questions (no discussion, please), it attempts to scrounge up some sympathy and support for him -- at least among the idiot disciples of, let's say, Oliver North. But it is the sculpted-torsoed, swivelling-hipped computer hacker (Hugh Jackman) who is the viewer's primary point of identification; and director Dominic Sena, showing the same moral scruples he showed in Gone in Sixty Seconds, would not feel quite right about involving him in these shenanigans without first furnishing him with a schmaltzy motive: rescuing his daughter from her porno-czar stepdad. Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Vinnie Jones. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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