Unambiguously fascist.
Mostly the film involves Ray Winstone grimacing and punching people in the face. His character, Jack Regan, heads up the Flying Squad, which sounds like a violent circus troupe but is actually the division of the Metropolitan Police that deals with armed robberies. One day a routine robbery ends in a random murder, and Ray, sorry Jack, must track down the culprits using only some hi-tech computers and surveillance technology and a few brick bats.
The dialogue is well-written, even if most of it pretty much goes:
Police Inspector Wearing Suit: Hey Jack, stop brutalising people.
Jack: Fuck off. [Punches him]
Throughout, the movie tells us that Jack is the good guy, that he’s the one who gets things done, that the suit upstairs is out of touch, jealous, impotent and, in a particularly unnecessary but sadly predictable touch, not manly enough (the evidence for this is that Jack fucks the suit’s wife). When the suit calls Jack a “dinosaur,” I couldn’t help agreeing, even though we’re not supposed to agree with the suit because he has effete hair and does that sneery thing with his mouth.
At the beginning, Jack is already a blundering, brutal arsehole. But he at least has some redeeming features. These features slowly disappear over the course of the film; when his world is, or at least ought to be, torn apart, his callous and mechanical reaction basically outs him as a psychopath. A nihilistic rampage of violence and death ensues - and although we’ve lost sight of what Jack’s fighting for, the film takes us along anyway and expects us to share in his brutal orgy of destruction, as though Jack can just say “fuck you” to the emptiness of his existence, punch it in the face, and move on. And, as the film contends, he can. But hey, Jack is all good because he Kills Bad Guys, and Killing Bad Guys is the point of characters like Jack.
The Sweeney’s soullessness could compare to Get Carter, were it not for the fact that this soullessness is, I suspect, unintentional. Moreover, Jack, unlike Carter, works for the fucking government and we’re supposed to grunt and roar with approval as he bludgeons his way through the malevolent thugs of the underworld.
The film is almost redeemed by one spectacular set piece, which almost compares to the heist scene in Heat and alone was worth the price of admission, especially when you consider that I was reviewing this film for Critic and got in for free. In every other respect, though, Heat leaves The Sweeney, with its cartoon ideology, seventies mentality and one-dimensional characters, in the dust.
2/5