The Sweeney
How do you make a film about police in the UK cool? British police don’t carry guns and you can never get far enough away from the stereotype of the bobby on the beat. This film makes a kind of compromise and the police in The Sweeney run around carrying baseball bats. when things finally warm up are they allowed gubs, but by, then all realism has been thrown out of the window.
The film stars arch cockney Ray Winstone as Jack Regan. Winstone is a great actor but this role is way too type cast and one that stifles him as an actor. It’s a clichéd role of the old school, high testosterone policeman who gets results and doesn’t care how he gets them. A yawning problem with Winstone in this film that he is way too old to be doing an action film like this and as a result he huffs and puffs his way through the film. He is so unconvincingly when he gets a chance to be so pretend virile – by having an affair with the IA chief’s wife – that he’s fooling no one. For younger audiences there’s Ben drew (AKA Plan B), as George Carter, the more considerate side kick. He’s alright but the role never asks for any greatness in acting. It also stars Damian Lewis as chief putting a slight accent to cover his real life poshness. Then there’s the true bad guy the IA chief, Lewis (Steven Mackintosh) the antithesis of Ray Winnstone’s supposed virility. He is desk bound, anemic too worried about playing the rules, attacking police instead of criminals etc. He is as much of a cliché as Ray Winstone’s character.
The plot is pretty forgettable – it concerns the shooting of an innocent woman at a break-in at a jewellery store. Some stuff happens, the investigation leads to a bank heist which is badly handled by the Sweeney and develops into a shoot out in Trafalgar Square which results in carnage. Winstone’s character has responsibility for the débâcle and it leads to him being briefly put in prison before being inexplicitly set free by his colleagues. It all ends with a car chase through a caravan park in Gravesend – but I can’t remember why.
It’s obviously that the director Nick Love was aiming to make a slick, Hollywood style crime caper, but on a low budget. The plot could have done with more humour, more of a nod to the old TV and films that this film was supposed to be based on. There’s little realism or any attempt to make one except to show the characters occasionally in an office. The film is helped along by lots of moody aerial shots of Canary Wharf and the City of London which sets the scene for a lot of the set pieces.
The Sweeney isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s also not that great. The creators tried to marry British policing with slick American action but couldn’t quite make it work. The film is big and brash but it’s flimsy material. It may be entertaining to watch in the cinema but it’ll be totally forgotten afterwards.
2/5
By Keith Hudson
Well, what a start to Series 7 with shocks and surprises at every corner, it was a tremendous opener, filled with sharp writing and performances in an episode that had it all: explosions, excitement and an extraordinary amount of soufflés and despite a twist that saw the Doctor being kidnapped along with Amy and Rory and forced into helping his sworn enemies, it’s classic Doctor Who as we see our heroes run about on a spaceship, blow up some Daleks, overcome mortal peril, and teleport back in time for tea.
playing the part of Oswin Oswald, dazzlingly funny, charming and offbeat, with a striking familiarity to the Doctor. When watching Oswin in her apparently cosy spaceship communicating with the Doctor outside in the snow, we naturally assume that both world’s we see are real and form part of the same universe and as all of Oswin’s actions come through the planet’s technology, we never question that she isn’t real, however the Doctor realises straight away that something is wrong, constantly questioning her about the milk for her soufflés and the reveal that Oswin was killed long ago and has been transformed into a Dalek, and that her cosy home-cooking lifestyle on board the spaceship is a fabrication is a total shock!
of today have lost.
The Fellowship of the Ring is set many years after Tolkien’s first short story, The Hobbit (natch), but instead of Bilbo Baggins setting off on an adventure, you have Frodo, his nephew…or maybe it’s his second cousin twice removed; you never can be sure with hobbits. Anyway, it is Frodo who is chosen for the incredibly daunting task of destroying the One Ring – that’s the magic ring that belonged to the Dark Lord Sauron, before he got done in about a thousand years ago. Bilbo has had it with him ever since he found it in Gollum’s cave, sixty years ago.
The plot is rather complicated (many would call it epic), full of dark twists and turns and magic, and “do we trust this person, or are they just trying to get their filthy mitts on the Ring?” kind of paranoia that is incredibly engrossing. Poor Frodo is like a fish out of water, having a nice life in the Shire, only to discover the uncle he loves has been hiding a dangerous secret from everyone, and now he has to pick up the pieces – it’s hardly fair, is it? Elijah Wood plays him admirably, I mean, when you spend most of the film having to look scared, it helps to have big eyes – and he certainly has those.