Review of S.W.A.T.

Introduction

After the semi-botched foiling of a violent bank robbery, SWAT cop Jim Street (Colin Farrell, boasting the first of many improbable monikers) is kicked off his squad only to have his partner Brian Gamble (!!!) (Jeremy Renner) lose his job altogether. Hondo Harrelson (!!!) (Samuel L. Jackson), an “old-school” SWAT commander takes a liking to Street’s slick brand of sanitized maverick and courts him for his new paramilitary team of trigger-happy Alpha dawgs. This, essentially, proves to be code to wean the teen demograph on a diet of flash-cut action, multi-ethnic pluralism and reconstructive gender fantasy (Michelle Rodriguez plays a sassy, butt-kicking cop who is also, wait for it, a tender single-mother.) Cue much training and booze-alley bonding, (which allows Gamble to seditiously plot a mercenary revenge off-screen). And whilst a romantic subplot between Farrell and Rodriguez staunchly, and refreshingly, refuses to develop, so does the central plot-line of a xenophobically typed drug lord (this time swarthy Frenchman Olivier Martinez) offering a $100 million bounty for his release from custody.

Video

A clean anamorphic transfer with no visible flaws. DP Gabriel Beristain has a habit of compulsively cutting to DV and grainy news footage like a cut price Oliver Stone, to no discernable effect. Good production values are marred only by some weak CGI in the finale.

Audio

No DTS, but the film makes good use of the surrounds and sound editor Cameron Frankley shows much skill and imagination in recreating an energetic sonic environment for the various chases and gunfights.

Features

The extras, despite a fluff ‘Making Of’, are good. There’s a bizarre, fetishistic guns and ammo featurette which is basically ‘Jackie Browns’ ‘Chicks With Guns’ only presented by hairy white men. There’s a cute featurette about the original TV show, a handful of nondescript deleted scenes, the theatrical trailer (twice!) short documentaries about the opening shoot-out, the CG jet landing on the 6th Street Bridge and the process of the film’s sound design. There are some fidgety sound effects deconstructions and a surprisingly funny gag reel where Farrell gets to drink and swear. A lot.

A twin-pack of commentaries are worth a listen, if only, on track one, for Michelle Rodriguez (surrounded by her SWAT cronies and director Clark Johnson) and her barely-veiled contempt for the whole enterprise. More interesting on track two is a commentary with the film’s throng of writers, credited and otherwise, those of ‘SWAT’s “Pony Express” who lasted the 8-year gestation period and are still on speaking terms with the Sony cookie-cutter. And whilst we don’t get, as promised, any comments from the film’s technical advisor and former SWAT officer Randy Walker, it’s interesting, for once to hear a commentary from a group of working Hollywood screenwriters. David Ayer and co. reveal some insights about the sorry state of the Tinseltown production machine, but their comments never stray that far from facile justifications for bad writing through crass, cynical insider humor.

Conclusion

In their haste (eight years, a heaving sprint by Hollywood development standards) to get ‘SWAT’ onto the screen, the eight screenwriters seem to have misplaced their plot and, indeed, an entire middle act. What we get in lieu of a coherent story are a labouriously extended training Act 1 and an endless series of increasingly preposterous ‘twist’ climaxes in Act 3. An abandonment of Aristotelian dramatic conventions that suggests either that the writer’s collective Syd Fiedian maxims cancelled one another out or that it takes a full deck of screenwriters (one per year, or one per ending, whichever you prefer) shuffling market-researched set-pieces to miss plot-holes as gaping as those which swallow ‘SWAT’s meagre narrative like a cluster of black-holes. So, ‘SWAT’, perhaps the most unintentionally revolutionary movie of the year.

Elsewhere, it’s business as usual. A supremely bored, and boring, Jackson resorts to playing himself-as-mentor but eventually reverts to type, poppin’ caps in the mo-fo’s ass whilst Rodriguez limps around in the background, chewing petulantly on her petted lip (what else, pray, is the requisite feisty titillation supposed to do?) Whilst the guys dive, machine-gun’s blazing into another furious gun-battle, she picks up the pieces, occasionally peppering a few impotent rounds into the hull of a leer jet. Martinez is barely permitted to do so much as exert his inherent French evilness (for a PG-13 movie, his one act of neck-slicing fury is rendered in bloodless abstraction) and resolves to calmly rapping his finger-nails off prison cinder-block walls whilst quietly day-dreaming about his paycheck. He is permitted, it should be noted, a great Dr. Evil impression as he sells his freedom to LA’s highest gang-banging bidder, “One hundred meeeeeelion dollars!”

The pace, it seems, remains so frenetic as to pack in as many cliches as possible (watching them build is akin to watching a water balloon bloat before it bursts.) The script has been cobbled together from so many sources that all we get is the anonymous din of hack mediocrity. Dialogue consists of hand-me-down aphorisms stuck like speech bubbles over the actor’s heads, conversations distilled into cornball expository blurbs and lamentable kiss-offs. I would say this “authentic” picture doesn’t feel touched by human hands, but there’s something deeply human and contemporary about its empty, effortless swarm of hackneyed conventions.

For once I don’t feel guilty about having never seen the original TV show as ‘SWAT’, the movie, is not a film I imagine to be peppered with more than a token flourish of piquant references. This is a straight-up, rather humorless and technically efficient action film that reconstitutes the most basic of references to the TV show to reconstruct a still strangely familiar vision of fanciful macho heroism. The lack of aloof, ironic intertexts is a bold move in a world of self-referential ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and ‘Starsky and Hutch’ re-imaginings, but the lack of a peppy pop-cultural dimension strips the movie back to the barest constraints of its action dynamics, and there’s not enough plot, or character to sustain any interest in the relentless storm of action in the final reel. For that, you need James Cameron, not Clark Johnson.