BEFORE: You can choose to mark this day however you want, I'm not one to say what's appropriate and what isn't. Just don't cast aspersions on how I choose to mark it, which is by watching a film about our (OK, L.A's) first responders. Colin Farrell carries over from "Phone Booth".
THE PLOT: An imprisoned drug kingpin offers a huge cash reward to anyone that can break him out of police custody and only the LAPD's S.W.A.T. team can prevent it.
AFTER: Last year at the San Diego Comic-Con, I passed a large bunch of people standing by one of the back entrances, with cameras ready. When I inquired about why, someone told me that they were going to be bringing Natalie Portman in through these doors. And someone told them that? There was only reason I could think or for someone to tip that, and it made me confident that Natalie Portman would NOT be coming in through that entrance. Sure enough, she appeared inside a booth in the center of the convention - I don't know how they got her in past the crowd, whether she was in disquise or inside a giant crate, but she sure didn't come through that door.
Similarly, if we get a tip that someone's looking to set off a truck bomb in NY, the one thing I can tell you is that someone's up to something else - we should be checking boats, planes and horse-drawn carriages instead. Though, to be safe, I guess don't stop looking for the truck bomb. But look how someone made an entire city paranoid just by leaking some information.
These are the tactics that the SWAT team has to consider. And yes, "T" stands for "Tactics", I guess I thought that the 2nd half of the acronym stood for "Anti-Terrorism", but I was mistaken. In this film an international criminal (we know he's bad because he sneaks things past airport security...) gets the entire criminal underworld working on breaking him free after he makes an offer via the press. See, it's all the media's fault, I knew it.
I never watched the original 1975-76 TV show, but this big-budget update seemed pretty satisfying. I assume they updated the characters, while making the team more racially diverse - Sgt. Hondo comes back to the squad after several years on another assignment. But he was white when he left, and now he's played by Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Mo' Better Blues").
Hondo gives the younger officer, Jim Street, a chance to get back on the team - he was benched after an earlier hostage situation where he and his partner disobeyed orders in an attempt to defuse a situation more quickly. Together they assemble a new team, put them through the special S.W.A.T. training courses, and then are ready to protect L.A. And of course, not too much screen-time passes before they're needed.
Pretty action-packed, as these things tend to be - nice and twisty, too, so I'll withhold some of my nitpick points since they'd contain spoilers. OK, just one.
NITPICK POINT: So, the characters in the movie "S.W.A.T." know the theme to the TV show "S.W.A.T.", and sing it together? That means that inside the movie universe, there's also a TV show about them? Does it also star Hondo, Street, T.J. and Deacon? Because that could get a little weird. Marvel Comics goes through the same conundrum, after accidentally showing Spider-Man reading comic books one time, they had to explain that within the Marvel Universe there's also a version of Marvel Comics, which licenses their stories directly from the superheroes (who are real, inside that fictional universe). But really, if people had Spider-Man battling Dr. Octopus in the streets of New York, would they really need to read comic books?
Also starring Michelle Rodriguez (last seen in "Avatar"), LL Cool J (last seen in "Any Given Sunday"), Josh Charles (last seen in "Dead Poets Society"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "The Town"), Brian Van Holt (last seen in "Black Hawk Down"), Olivier Martinez, and Reg E. Cathey, with a cameo from Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Dinner For Schmucks")
RATING: 6 out of 10 manhole covers
S.W.A.T. just makes me think about "The IT Factor," a rather nice documentary-reality series that followed the travails of a half-dozen struggling actors.
ReplyDeleteBy the end of the series you could tell that the show's producers had been looking to fill a "wish list" of types. There was the "I'll move to LA and become a famous actress!" type who will waste years of her life and tens of thousands of dollars without figuring out that you can't succeed in a factory town without a product or a skill to sell. There was the "actor's actor" type who loves the work and is brilliant at what he does, but whose only real goal is to do good work and stay employed.
Jeremy Renner was the "working actor on a career trajectory" one. At the time they started shooting the show, he'd just finished shooting a biopic about Jeffrey Dahmer which had no real distribution and made no money, but a strong performance attracted the right kinds of attention. By the end of the series, he and his agent and his manager were sifting through offers for his next project. They had narrowed it down between a starring role in an indy-ish film that would allow him to show his skills as an actor but which probably wouldn't make him much money...or a supporting role in "S.W.A.T." which would pay him a relative fortune and instantly put him on the top level of the industry's radar.
The final episode showed him moving into a big, expensive condo. I always respected that choice. :)