DVD Review: The Sweeney (2012)

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Drew, Hayley Atwell
Director: Nick Love
Country: UK
Genre: Action | Crime | Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The Sweeney is being released on DVD on Tuesday, April 2nd courtesy of Entertainment One. For more information on The Sweeney as well as additional Entertainment One releases visit eonefilms.com and follow Entertainment One on Twitter @eOnefilms.

Adapted from the 1970s TV series of the same name, a show hinged on the idea that its eponymous armed response squad was a relic of times gone by, The Sweeney seems a spectacularly ill-suited candidate for a modern updating, its transposition of that narrative four decades into the future assured only to further divorce these characters and their actions from reality. And that’s precisely the effect; this is a film not just out of touch with reality, but actively ignoring it too, refusing to return its calls and pretending not to see it from across the street.

This defiant commitment to the patent nonsense the narrative peddles—there is a plot, complete with MacGuffin, though even the characters seem to struggle to remember what it is…

Oddly, this glaring anachronism plays to the strengths of director Nick Love, a filmmaker whose general critical reception to date would leave you forgiven for thinking his name and the word strengths have no place in the same sentence. Here the usual obnoxiousness of his characters is replaced by an obnoxiousness of plot, its self-aware sense of unreality feeding off the bawdy boyishness of Love’s camerawork. It’s stupid and it knows it full well, meeting the challenge of modernising an already outmoded concept by indulging in the ludicrousness of its very basis and committing to full throttle as the “flying squad”—a name dropped without reference, expecting us to be aware of it and its titular nickname—arrive, baseball bats at the ready, at the scene of a robbery.

This defiant commitment to the patent nonsense the narrative peddles—there is a plot, complete with MacGuffin, though even the characters seem to struggle to remember what it is—is a curious strength of The Sweeney, allowing absurd set pieces like a running shoot-out through Trafalgar Square, complete with bicycles, and a high-speed pursuit through a caravan park to seem not only perfectly plausible, but terrifically enjoyable too. It helps a great deal to have Ray Winstone along for the ride; playing squad leader Regan—a man to whom there are no criminals and suspects, only villains and slaaaags—he catapults himself into the role with that uncanny devotion, dedicated to his characters no matter their nature, characteristic of Winstone performances since his breakthrough role as hard-man Carlin in 1979′s Scum.

What could easily be dismissed the quasi-gangster infatuations of Love, though, seem instead to indicate ever-brimming deeper intentions in the script, co-written with John Hodge of Trainspotting fame. There’s a certain quality to Winstone here, a reserved fatigue that undermines the raw masculinity of his star persona.

That’s a film toward which The Sweeney seems incessantly to nod, incidentally, the infamous scene of pool ball brutality directly referenced no fewer than twice, and Winstone’s performance adorned with the shadow of Carlin. What could easily be dismissed the quasi-gangster infatuations of Love, though, seem instead to indicate ever-brimming deeper intentions in the script, co-written with John Hodge of Trainspotting fame. There’s a certain quality to Winstone here, a reserved fatigue that undermines the raw masculinity of his star persona. He spends more of the film than necessary near-nude; he has colleagues inspect evidence because he’s forgotten his glasses; he turns dark corners with an added second of hesitation: there is to the minutiae of his performance a delicate undercurrent of reality that feeds off the unreality of the surrounding film, embellishing this old dinosaur with a sense of self that—against all odds—makes us care.

A suggestion of actual humanity beneath a flashy veneer of slaaaags and shootouts does not, of course, a great film make; rather, its indication of some deep-seated awareness of the real world infuses a film as absurdly unreal as The Sweeney with a redemptive quality that excuses its abject abandonment of any ties to a realistic—or even conceivable—representation of life in the flying squad. “I like him,” says George, Regan’s young underling, in one of many strangely irrelevant interludes, “he’s got panache.” It’s a sentiment that sits well with the film itself. By any logical criterion, The Sweeney should be a terrible movie, but then this isn’t the sort of movie with which logic is on speaking terms. Logic’s a slaaaag.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

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