The Sweeney

Nick Love has rarely ventured outside of his cockney crime flicks, so adapting a cult cop TV series set in London seems like a natural fit for the director. Channelling Michael Mann's visceral execution was also a wise move; forgetting to write an engaging plot, however, was not. At points The Sweeney borders on Eastenders with shootouts; but Winstone and Drew do make for a fun pairing, despite the sometimes cringe-worthy exchanges.

Winstone and popular crooner/rapper Drew are tough bastard detectives at the higher end of the food chain in the titular elite police unit, The Sweeney, located at a swish Scotland Yard office. Their methods might not always be conventional, but damn it they get results. We don't really see them get results, just mess up the current case continually, but they have apparently gotten results a lot in the past - we know this because they say it a lot - so why wouldn't we believe them? Winstone's hard-living Jack Regan is also having an affair with the inexplicably attractive wife (Atwell) of a superior officer who, naturally enough, wants his badge. Investigating a murder/robbery our two heroes get in deep, but "there's deep and there's which way is up." If you get that quote then you catch my drift.

Off the bat, the casting for The Sweeney is spot on. Winstone may have been a conventional choice for the tough cockney cop role, but Drew pulls off an underwritten role with much aplomb. Granted, you don't get to see much of that here (acting, that is), but they at least look like two guys who'd drink in the same boozer. There's also huge potential for strong imagery and gritty action; that's two things - surprisingly for a British feature - that it does well.

By definition a testosterone fuelled couple of hours, it steals liberally from the likes of the recent Miami Vice feature adaptation. The feel is the same, the look is the same; in fact both films could exist within the same world, which Love may take as a compliment. It just doesn't gel the way Mann's underrated crime flick did; the cops are so bad at their jobs you almost side with the suit trying to shut them down.

Lacks likeable, remotely believable characters but there are enough thrills and testosterone fuelled action sequences to keep the undemanding cinema goer entertained.