S.W.A.T. (2003) (PG-13) ★½
From the minute S.W.A.T. starts rolling, it's clear we've got a wanna-be blockbuster on our hands. And we all know what that means.
Story
It means that what little plot there is will be formulaic and predictable. It means a dashing hero will spout pithy one-liners, while his sidekicks will try to be funny and fail. But there will also be a cool helicopter crash and a lot of firepower and maybe even some blood and guts. Cool! On that basis, S.W.A.T. does not disappoint. It doesn't much matter that the villain of the story, a drug trafficker/murderer/arms dealer called Alex Montel (Olivier Martinez), only really comes on the scene in the last 45 minutes or so, or that until then, the villain is any criminal anywhere in the city that comes in contact with the newly formed, yet much-maligned, five-person S.W.A.T. team that's the center of the story. Led by Sgt. ''Hondo'' Harrelson (Samuel L. Jackson), the team is composed mostly of the force's unreliable renegades and unwanted rejects: Jim Street (Colin Farrell), T.J. McCabe (Josh Charles), Chris Sanchez (Michelle Rodriguez), Michael Boxer (Brian Van Holt) and Deke Kaye (LL Cool J). After an intense training period and a few impressive successes, the underdog team is called in to save the day when Montel makes a televised offer of $100 million to anyone who can break him out of jail--and L.A.'s criminal element comes out in force to do so.
Acting
The lack of a plot during the first hour and a half of this movie is probably why the studio is euphemistically billing it as ''character-driven.'' It's kind of like saying that tiny efficiency apartment you're renting is ''cozy.'' Don't let them get one over on you, though; these characters are every bit as shallow as you expect gun-toting action heroes to be. If you want to know what drives somebody to tackle a profession that requires them to shoot people in cold blood on an almost daily basis, you won't find out watching S.W.A.T.. Farrell at least seems to want to get at the underbelly of the S.W.A.T. psychology, but his stereotypically heroic character lacks the complexity that would allow him to do it. So Farrell rolls those limpid brown eyes wildly in their sockets as if he's trying to let out his inner serial killer and mumbles his way through the lines. Jackson, on the other hand, doesn't even try to give us more. He simply phones this one in (''$20 million? Summer blockbuster? Sure, I'll do it. What's it about again?''). Fortunately, Rodriguez is more bearable as the tough Sanchez--she lights up the screen and has great timing--and Martinez makes a very sexy bad guy.
Direction
The amount of gun violence in S.W.A.T. is particularly startling, even for a big blockbuster, because the aforementioned, shallow characters never really reflect on what they do. The film justifies its violence in one line of dialogue--''S.W.A.T. is a life saving organization, not a life taking one''--yet we only meet one person whose life was saved, and even she took a bullet in the process. But we do see an awful lot of nameless, faceless criminals get blown to bits. Don't get me wrong; I'm no Joe Lieberman. I loved Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and I think Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are among the best movies ever made. It's not that there's even anything wrong with a good ol' fashioned shoot-'em-up movie--although how S.W.A.T. ever got a PG-13 rating is beyond me. Just don't patronize the audience with some false justification for blowing away half the cast and most of the extras. We're really much smarter than that.
Bottom Line
Frustratingly shallow summer blockbuster fare, S.W.A.T. takes gratuitous gun violence to a whole new level.
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