THE opening is extraordinary and entirely disconnected from anything that follows in this biff-bang Joel Silver-Dominic Sena production.

Criminal mastermind John Travolta sits at the lunch table, pontificating over the rotten state of Hollywood and its "unremarkable, unbelievable" blockbuster product.

On the one hand, this is the best scene of its kind since those lunching Reservoir Dogs de-constructed Madonna's Like A Virgin. On the other, how big a kettle and how much black paint does Travolta require, given his own participation in Battlefield Earth, Michael, Look Who's Talking Too and much more dross besides.

It is one heck of an audacious gambit, and one that is promptly shattered by a bank-destroying bomb, an explosive sequence beyond anything in Pearl Harbor. And that is that: this turns out to be a false dawn, a fantastic scene out of chronological order, around which Sena builds the rest of his confusing, daft hi-tech action thriller with more concern for good looks than the brain inside.

Alas, the opening is a case of Norman Greenbaum Syndrome: start with a number one single and then.... who cares.

There is never any further explanation for that Hollywood-bashing start, and the rest of the movie never makes sense either - and yet the dialogue is on occasion witty if far too pleased with itself. How bewildering!

Travolta, with his jazz-cool strip of beard and slicked-back hair, looks his dark-suited, Italian best since that memorable double of Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, albeit a little chubbier around the gills. Licking his lips at resuming his past peaks, he plays a "techno-terrorist", Gabriel Shear, who claims to commit his crimes in the cause of patriotism. By a route too complicated to explain - the movie trailer is appropriately incomprehensible - he wants to get his hands on billions, forcing disgraced former government computer wizard Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) to undertake his government code-cracking dirty work for him.

While Jobson busies himself hacking into a bank security system, somewhere his assistant, Halle Berry, fits into the plot. Very kindly she drops her book at one point to reveal her topless loveliness for no better reason than the film wanted to cover or maybe uncover all angles, and apparently Halle obliged for a tidy extra sum.

Berry's chest, computer-hacking, politics, hard stares from Vinnie Jones, hookers, terrorism, Travolta's goatee, a bus attached to a helicopter flying dangerously close to skyscrapers, that Swordfish title, what does it all mean? No idea, and like Dominic Sena's last flash movie, it will be gone in 60 seconds.