After creating some of the most abhorrent British crime films of the last decade, most of them featuring Danny Dyer, director Nick Love promised his latest effort, a take on 70’s cop show The Sweeney, would show a different side to him. Armed with a bigger budget and a classier cast, Love has certainly made his best film to date but it isn’t quite the revelation he would have you believe.
The Sweeney resides squarely in the director’s comfort zone of hard cockneys swearing a lot and hitting each other as much as possible, only this time around the geezers aren’t football hooligans, they’re the police, though in Love’s world there’s barely a difference. Headed up by old school copper Regan (Ray Winstone) and his younger partner Carter (Ben ‘Plan B’ Drew), the London Flying Squad – or ‘Sweeney’, after Sweeney Todd – use guns, baseball bats, pick-axe handles and anything else they can get their hands on to strong arm suspects.
The squad’s roughhouse tactics have brought them to the attention of weasely internal affairs officer Lewis who is now trying to nail Regan and shut down the squad. It’s an odd move considering his wife Nancy (Hayley Atwell) is a member of the squad but considering she’s having a bizarrely indiscrete affair with Regan, you can’t blame him.
Meanwhile, Regan and Carter are in the middle of tracking down former bank robber Allen (Paul Anderson) who they suspect of murdering a witness during a jewellery store robbery.
As the film’s central story, the hunt for Allen and his gang of cardboard cut-out crims isn’t nearly interesting enough to carry the film and only really serves to drag the film from one action set-piece to another. Aiming for thrilling Hollywood car chases and Heat-style shootouts, the majority of the action here feels workmanlike and often out of place with chases taking place on country roads and caravan parks.
The more engaging story thread is the adultery angle which, if developed a little more, could’ve made for a weightier film. The tension between Regan and Lewis is palpable, with Luther’s Steven Mackintosh making Lewis suitably slimy though it’s a shame he didn’t have the chance to create a better-rounded, sympathetic character since he is really the victim here.
But in a Nick Love film, the hard men prosper and it’s Regan and Carter who are our heroes here. Though a relative newcomer, Drew impresses with a calm, natural performance that provides a welcome counterpoint to Winstone’s scenery-chewing, spouting out cockney clichés left, right and centre. A magnetic screen presence and an actor capable of real power, sadly this is Winstone on auto-pilot.
So Love hasn’t strayed far from home and as a modern update of the series, The Sweeney still feels like a dinosaur. There’s some good material here lost in the macho posturing and Brit-crime tropes, though it might have just enough ludicrous one-liners and over-the-top scenes to become a guilty pleasure for some.
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