Review of S.W.A.T. (2003) by Matthew P — 03 Aug 2011

S.W.A.T. serves solely as a film that is meant to entertain you, but nothing more. It's a film without much heart, point or interesting developments, but if all you want to do is see its characters do some action scenes, and have a plot that kind of gives them a reason to do them, well, I guess S.W.A.T. is the movie you should see. Or one of the other films that can serve this purpose. And let me tell you, there's a lot of them.

The one thing that S.W.A.T. does differently is setting out to have its action scenes grounded in reality (mostly). The film opens with a bank robbery that, you guessed it, calls for the SWAT team to be deployed. Things go wrong when one of the team members decides to disobey orders and ends up shooting a civilian. Oops! He and his partner are later punished, with the one who open fired (Jeremy Renner) leaving the squad, and his partner, Jim Street (Colin Farrell) being forced to look after equipment in the "gun cage".

6 months go by in what feels like a quick cut, (probably because that's what happens), and Samuel L. Jackson appears as "Hondo". He's supposedly a veteran of the SWAT team, and he's been called back into action to put together a team that will do something. I'm not really sure the purpose of this team, but they become our focus and end up being the best of the best. The team consists of Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, LL Cool J, Josh Charles and Brian Van Holt. Their character names are not important, so I'll refer to them by their real names.

They undergo a training montage, which ends up being the highlight of the film. Led by Jackson, they perform mock drills and stuff of that nature. They even play some form of card game by picking their cards by shooting at them with sniper rifles. This part of the film is the best part, because there is a humor that the characters seem to be aware of. They aren't taking anything too seriously, and that makes the experience fun.

Since S.W.A.T. kind of sets up like an origin story, the plot doesn't really start until the film only has 45 minutes left in its runtime. There's a billionaire Frenchman (Olivier Martinez) who gets arrested and must be transported to the government or something like that, because he's committed crimes all over the planet. Because our newly-trained squad are now the best of all the LAPD, they need to transport this man into custody. Martinez previously announced that he'll give anyone that "rescues" him $100 million. No prizes for guessing that something goes wrong in this transport.

Everything up until this point can be seen as possible and even probable. We're given realistic events that keep us grounded in reality. But then, that goes kaput when an airplane lands on a 4-lane bridge. In a film that tries so hard for the majority of its runtime to stay believable, it breaks this mirage with one scene, that didn't need to happen. Are there no parks in Los Angeles? Could the plane not have landed in one of these? Even a soccer field would have been more realistic than this.

Since that was the only thing that S.W.A.T. really had going for it, and it couldn't even maintain that, the rest of the movie ends up being quite a big mess. The story and characters are unclear, what characters we do see are stock, having little personalities of their own. (Rodriguez is the "tough girl", and the police chief is the "mean guy", as examples.) And what characters we do get are forced into the background so that Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson can run the show. Even though Jackson doesn't do much action or shooting here, he is prominently featured. Most of the action comes from Farrell, who gets boatloads more time on-screen than the other characters, even though his character isn't in the least bit interesting.

And then there's the soundtrack, which almost never actually fits with what's going on. It's like the people who made the film went "Hey", you know what we should do? Let's include a lot of loud, licensed music, both during and not during the action scenes. Why? Because loud music is awesome!" It just doesn't work, and it's really distracting especially when no action is actually taking place.

The plot is also full of cliches and you'll be able to see some of the twists coming from a mile away. There are hints throughout the film regarding a character turn, and they aren't even that subtle. Some films get better on a second viewing because you'll notice some of the foreshadowing when you don't have to concentrate and guess what's going to happen. Here, you can pretty much figure it out on the first go-round. I can only imagine how boring the film would become on a second viewing, although I do not intend to find out by giving it one.

S.W.A.T. is a film that has little purpose, almost no originality, and wasn't skillfully created so that its single gimmick, realism, would stay consistent. The result is a mess that is not all that entertaining and is more tedious to watch than it should be. There are a ton of movies out there that will entertain you more, even if that's all that they'll do. S.W.A.T. is not one of the good ones, and therefore is not one that you should watch.