The Job is Never Done

Fans of 1970s television likely remember S.W.A.T., a two-season series that spun-off from another show, The Rookies, which itself went for four seasons. I did not watch that show, as I was not yet alive then, and did not realize there was a whole franchise brewing under the surface when, in 2003, a film called S.W.A.T. came out. I just knew that it had some recognizable stars in it – Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, and LL Cool J, among others. It looked like an amusing time with decent acting and fun bits, and I figured I’d see it at some point.

And then promptly forgot about it for a few months. It looks interesting, but not really that interesting. As it stood, the film debuted in August of 2003 and managed to make $200 Mil at the Box Office against a budget of $70 Mil. Not bad, and certainly enough to be considered a “success”, but also not enough to fast track a sequel. It was a blip on the radar for most people, and then they moved on. Which, honestly, is fair for this film. It’s fun, it has action, but it’s not exactly memorable. Even when I finally did see it, on home video which I rented from Blockbuster (a bygone era of movie discovery that we’ve lost since then) I can’t exactly say I remembered it after. It was just… there.

But then, that seems to be the legacy of the franchise. The movie came and went, not unlike the TV show before it, and then two direct-to-video loose sequels came along after that everyone forgot about. Only the most recent show, 2017’s S.W.A.T., has managed to stick around, running for eight seasons despite CBS trying to kill it off at one point, but how often do you hear people talking about the show? It’s channel filler, a shot that can run indefinitely so long as people turn on their TVs in the evening and have the show playing in the background. And that feels like the ultimate fate of the movie as well, something good enough to put on, but not necessarily something to pay attention to.

S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons and Tactics) members of the LAPD Officer III James "Jim" Street (Colin Farrell) and Officer III Brian Gamble (Jeremy Renner) are part of a team handling a bank robbery with hostages. The orders are to hang back, wait, and keep an eye on the situation while the negotiator talks to the robbers, but Gamble doesn’t want to hang back. He decides to sneak into the bank and Street, being his partner, follows. What ensues is a firefight where some of the hostages get caught in the line of fire. The higher-ups, including Captain II Tom Fuller (Larry Poindexter), are none too happy at the two team members breaking from orders and putting people in danger. Because of their actions Gamble is shit-canned off the force while Street is busted down to the S.W.A.T. armory to ride a desk for the rest of his time.

But then along comes the recently returned Sergeant II Dan "Hondo" Harrelson (Samuel L. Jackson). Hondo wants to put together a special team, trained his way, handling S.W.A.T. business with more creativity and finesse. He taps Street, along with a group of other misfits – Michelle Rodriguez as Officer III Christina "Chris" Sanchez, LL Cool J as Officer III Deacon "Deke" Kaye, Josh Charles as Officer III Travis Joseph "T.J." McCabe – to be part of the team so they can be Hondo’s best bet at keeping the streets safe. And they’ll be needed when a known drug lord, Alex "Le Loup Rouge" Montel (Olivier Martinez), gets caught by the police and offers, on live TV, a multi-million payday to anyone that breaks him free. S.W.A.T. will be needed to transfer the man before all hell breaks out.

As a movie, S.W.A.T. feels very weird. It is, on one hand, a pretty low-level, street cop adventure, with the team members training around L.A. before getting unleashed to deal with a number of small crimes around town. But at the same time, there’s also the subplot about the drug lord coming to town, killing, driving around, getting caught, and then offering his big payday. For most of the film it doesn’t feel like these two threads connect as Montel has nothing to do with Hondo’s team and their training. It only comes together in the last act, and it makes for a very awkward fit as the film suddenly has to gear up to be a blockbuster it wasn’t ready for.

I do understand that the film needed to figure out something for its climax. It has a fairly simple structure with act one introducing the team, act two training the team, and then act three giving the team something big to tackle, and Montel is that climactic final task. But at the same time, he feels like he’s grafted on, while something more set to what the S.W.A.T. team has been training for would make more sense as the last act of the film. It’s like the team suddenly finds themselves transported into a different movie for the entire last 45 minutes or so of the film.

Now, in fairness, the last act is pretty awesome. It’s a great climax to the film, with multiple chase scenes, some tense gunfights, and a fantastic final sequence where a SUV takes on a plane. Big, over-the-top, fun to watch stuff. The movie handles the climactic action well, with a solid pace to everything and great production values. As a piece of cinema on its own, the last act of the film works great, it just doesn’t feel like it ties as well to the rest of the film as it could, in large part because the villain, Montel, has no relation to the main characters we were watching for most off the movie.

The film tries to rectify this by (spoilers for a 20-plus year old movie) having disgraced cop Gamble be part of the team that breaks Montel free and tries to get him out of LA. Gamble, though, isn’t really a great character. For starters, he’s played pretty listlesslike by Renner, a generally awful actor who, for some reason, keeps showing up in franchise blockbusters. But Gable also disappears for huge stretches of the film, making him practically a non-entity. I understand that was the setup for the film, but if the movie had done things differently, and had Gamble get moved to a different team while blaming Street for the foul up at the start of the film, that would have meant that he’d be a character we’d see around the department, and we’d have reason to hate him more such that when he did a heel-turn, it would mean something to us.

Or, better yet, just remove Montel from the film and do a different climax. We opened the movie with a bank robbery gone wrong, so why not bring it back around, for the film and for Street, and close the film out on another bank robbery? That keeps the crime at the same level, something the S.W.A.T. team has trained for (their test in the film to graduate from S.W.A.T. school is to defuse a faux plane hijacking). It narratively brings us back around to the start of the film, so Street can make good on a past mistake. And it lets us keep the focus squarely on the characters without needing to develop any side villain to be used much later on. It works better, narratively, than what we got.

I honestly think the narrative hoops S.W.A.T. has to go through are why the film faded so quickly from public consciousness. It’s a fun film across all three acts, but an uneven one. Aligning the last act to the first two parts of the film would have made for a more cohesive narrative and a better experience overall. It’s clear the cast and crew had fun on the film, and that comes across in spades. But there’s just something missing, that one piece that could have pulled it together, and it keeps the film from true greatness.