Hey folks, Harry here... S.W.A.T. is one of the films that I've been covering since the beginning of AICN. I loved the original Ron Mita and Jim McClain script - and am not quite the fan of the resulting script that David Ayer and David McKenna turned it into. I remember the seemingly endless years of it being tied up in Arnie's hands - promising to be the best ensemble action film for him since PREDATOR, from what Beaks has to say... it seems that S.W.A.T. turned out to be a bit ho-hum, that's a damn shame for a project that started life as one of the best action scripts I've ever read. Gotta love that there development process...
S.W.A.T. (d. Clark Johnson, w. David Ayer and David McKenna, based on a story by Ron Mita and Jim McClain)
The appropriate barometer for determining the success of S.W.A.T. will not be measured by the Sunday morning box office estimates, but by the number of young males who turn up at police department recruiting offices the following Monday, eager to protect and to serve and to bring down a Learjet smack dab in the middle of a major metropolitan city.
Arriving way too late in a summer season that’s already worn down audiences’ tolerance levels for unbridled mayhem (check out those TOMB RAIDER 2 numbers and that unsightly 53% drop by BAD BOYS II this past weekend), S.W.A.T.’s alone distinction is the shamelessness with which it promotes the bullet-whizzing efficiency of the L.A.P.D.’s elite Special Weapons and Training Unit as they heroically respond to incidents too explosive for regular law enforcement. Though there are a few bad apples that figure crucially into the plot later on in the film (not really a spoiler since they’re readily giving it away in the trailer and television spots), the rest of the team is a model of enthusiastic professionalism, apprehending perps with measured force, and resorting to the kill shot only when absolutely necessary. There are also boasts of how the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. send their recruits to train with S.W.A.T. These guys are the best of the best. It seems as if S.W.A.T. does everything save for cash checks. They’re like Christ with assault rifles. I don’t think the L.A.P.D. has looked this good since SPEED.
Of course, these are some thoroughly dubious criteria for judging a film’s quality, but in a year in which I’ve actively enjoyed two Michael Bay productions, I figured it wasn’t so farfetched to expect that I’d lap this up like Ann Coulter at a HUAC Hearing reenactment. Besides, despite being a needless big screen transfer of a short-lived television show, the film does have a pretty decent pedigree, what with actor-turned-director Clark Johnson’s outstanding work on THE SHIELD, and contributions from highly-touted screenwriters Ayer and McKenna.
The film certainly gets off to a serviceably ferocious start, thrusting the audience into the tumult of an attempted bank robbery gone bad, with a few hostage-taking thieves holding the police at bay with their considerable firepower. (In a bizarre feat of cinema mimicking reality mimicking cinema, the whole scene is vaguely reminiscent of the real life North Hollywood shootout from a few years ago, which itself recalled a sequence from Michael Mann’s HEAT.) Johnson capably manages the mayhem as S.W.A.T. gets called in to handle the rapidly disintegrating situation, giving us a decent sense of the geography and, to an reasonable extent, the planning that goes into an operation like this. This is also our introduction to officer Jim Street (Colin Farrell filling in for the late Robert Urich), who, along with his loose cannon partner, Brian Gamble (Jeremy Renner), storms the bank and takes down the bad guys. However, in the midst of the skirmish, Gamble intentionally wounds a civilian to get a better shot at a perp, which gets the boys kicked off of S.W.A.T. in a cliché-ridden scene where exchanges like, “You’re off the force,” and “Street is a good cop” are thrown around straight-faced.
That’s the problem with S.W.A.T. It can’t decide whether it wants to be a semi-intelligent procedural, or an unapologetically trite and mindless action film. Johnson mostly shoots it in the gritty, hand-held style of the former, which works well enough for the training sequences (roughly the first half of the film), where Street is given the chance to join a new unit headed up by Lt. “Hondo” Harrelson (a coasting Samuel L. Jackson), and rounded out by a motley band of recruits, including LL Cool J (who, coincidentally, sampled the S.W.A.T. theme song for his brag-rap classic, “I’m Bad”), Josh Charles and Michelle Rodriguez. But this approach ends up clashing with the increasingly stupid plot twists, becoming downright annoying in the poorly-lit nighttime finale, where the graininess of the image distracts from the… well, nothing, really. The movie peaks with the first renegade attempt to liberate drug lord Olivier “One hundred meeleeon dollars!” Martinez, staged in the middle of Hollywood and Wilcox, and limps to its improbable finish with such torpidity that the film itself seems to be acknowledging its own resounding mediocrity. (I mean, you’ve obviously run out of ideas (or money) when one of your big action beats involves blowing up a stubborn padlock with a claymore.) By the time Street opts to prolong his climactic mano a mano showdown with Gamble by ejecting the last round out of his pistol, I was kind of hoping his nemesis would take him to the woodshed for needlessly drawing out the movie.
It’s not that S.W.A.T. is a bad movie – aside from that listless last twenty-or-so minutes, it’s acceptable action fodder for the hard-up genre enthusiast. But it’s just so complacent in its execution that one wonders why they bothered.
Faithfully submitted,
