The Sweeney (2012)

My my. You could tell this was directed by a mate of Danny Dyer's. The film itself was so far removed from anything that would happen in the real world it was laughable.

Ray Winstone as Regan was basically Ray Winstone i.e. he went around calling people horrible names and punching or nutting them. The plot was paper thin and there were many examples of "how could they be so thick??!!" coming from my sofa.

Decision making by the characters was just plain ridiculous and then there were the continuity errors and/or just generally stupid mistakes. Regan is on the way to a bank robbery; it is the morning and the bank is open. Somehow he is able to drive along the Embankment in London at 60+mph and there is NO traffic. And of course people hid behind cars & furniture during shoot-outs and naturally were completely unharmed.

The only good things in it were Ben Drew (playing himself as usual) and Hayley Atwell (although she should have known better than to take this part). Even Damian Lewis obviously just needed to pay the Gas Bill, as he was utterly anonymous as Haskins.

Please avoid this utter piece of total horse manure. Watch an episode or two of the original TV series with Thaw & Waterman on ITV4. It will be a far better way to spend 2 hours.

Fmovies: This movie is absolutely sh-t. It is a disgrace to the late, great, John Thaw and the writers, producers directors and rest of the cast of the original Sweeney. There is about 3 lines of plot and about 5 minutes that is understandable. The characters have no depth and Regan seems to be a murder obsessed thug with Carter being as thick as 30 planks. The actors have no talent at all. One gets the feeling that the writer wrote this during a severe hang over. Seriously if I was on a 12 hour pane trip and there was nothing to do but watch this movie or a golf championship, I would become an avid golf follower. To quote The Guardian's review: "The writer Ian Kennedy-Martin based the original television series The Sweeney on the hard-drinking escapades and questionable methods of a real-life Flying Squad copper, but this remake doesn't feel like it's based on anything remotely real. It doesn't even feel like it's based on The Sweeney."

I remember the original TV series with fondness, a low budget but gutsy, urban, gritty cop show. If you've ever seen The Shield or Life on Mars you have an idea of the kind of show it show it was.

What the makers thought they were getting from this show I do not know. The title is the only thing this movie has in common with the original. This is a very slickly affair with cinematography befitting a sic-fi movie. The musical score is straight from Nolan's Batman, and most of the action seems to happen in country lanes and yacht docks when it should have been happening on the streets of London. The scenes that do happen on the streets of London show a bizarre deserted version of London I've never seen, not even at 3 in the morning. The story and the acting are not worth mentioning.

The plot to the movie is straight out of an American action movie which is a real shame. If you've never seen the original or even heard of it then you probably think it's a passable action movie. However as there was such an opportunity to do something uniquely British and original here it is a huge disappointment. It just goes to show that Hollywood are not the only ones that produce hackneyed crap.

The Sweeney fmovies. Would love to give this good ratings, was hoping to.. But.

Opening scene was beyond stupid. The bit in the middle was daft as hell.

And the less said about the ending the better.

Great acting, just very poor script and the director should go back to film school.. (does a director not have any control??)

Note to writer/director.. Never give that kind of daft opening if you want to be taken seriously..

Or daft ending..

Or daft middle bit...

The style of the movie largely relies on sweeping glass and steel shots of London, while they're beautifully done and almost futuristic, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the opening scenes of The Apprentice they're so disjointed from the film itself.

The Sweeney are The Flying Squad of London's Metropolitan Police, tasked with cracking down on violent crime and armed robberies. They're loud, cocky, and vicious and, if the cases we're shown are anything to go by, very, very bad at their job.

Regan (Winston) is head man and a law unto himself, his sidekick Carter (Drew) and the rest of his special ops team are housed in a swish crow's nest of Scotland Yard with all mod cons. While Winston and Drew have an unmistakable chemistry on screen they really didn't have much to work with. Drew delivers his lines painfully slow, as if inebriated but you have to give it to the guy, he's not bad when it comes to fisticuffs. The gung ho ways and abysmal record of their squad attracts the attention of Internal Affairs, who are just waiting for a reason to shut them down. The wait isn't very long.

England's capital is largely deserted for the duration, which again beggars belief. There's a monumental hot pursuit and shoot out on an almost empty Trafalgar Square with just enough passers by to be pushed violently to the ground by both the fleeing criminals and the cops themselves, by the third time, it was comically so. It would appear that The Sweeney have been trained at the Storm Trooper Shooting Range as London town is shot up in relentless gunfire but not one bullet reaches its target. Think Hot Fuzz not Miami Vice.

The plot is convoluted, the cases needlessly complicated and for the life of me I couldn't get excited about a Serbian Georgie Burgess as the bad guy. While Nick Love is renowned for his cockney gangster offerings, unfortunately this time round he didn't think to bring either a decent story or a coherent script to the table.

The Sweeney is somewhat enjoyable but it borders on parody far too often. It's outdated and overplayed with enough product placement have an accompanying catalog. It would have made a decent TV special but for a big screen outing it's a meh from me.

Unbelievable tosh throughout. Terrible plot and acting, attempted style and no content. The soundtrack bleared all the way through which was the best thing as it covered the characters. Ray Winston is one dimensional - watch him as Henry viii - "I wanna ave a san" LOL. Repulsive sex story between Winston and a female cop. Carter was played by a plank. The Sweeney in the Met could not exist as portrayed in this day and age - 70s is where is belongs and trying to update it was a total failure in all departments. If is wasn't on free TV I wouldn't have watched it and I only continued to view it because it was so abysmally boring and amusing.