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S.W.A.T.
(Reviewed August 5, 2003)
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For the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone who has a working TV set would leave the house to see this movie. It is so generic, so by-the-numbers, so nothing-special that you may as well sit home and take your pick of any mediocre guns-as-porn cop show that you can see for nothin' on the tube just about every hour of every dang day.
Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez and Samuel L. Jackson go through the motions as S.W.A.T. team members, bonding and bullshitting and breaking heads so predictably that the "teamwork uber alles" plot borders on parody. We've seen this stuff so often that maybe having fun with it by going for big laughs would have been a better strategy than trying to play things straight.
Also, the direction here is so slipshod that big shoot-'em-up action scenes are sometimes a confusing mess. Besides being hard to follow--the director seems to have a real aversion to putting the camera in the right place, much less keeping it there long enough--the image often is rendered in fuzzy TV-monitor-type scan lines, for no discernible reason. Hey, pal, if I want to see a picture like this, I can stay in my own crackerbox and turn on the friggin' idiot box.
For this somebody needs to spend $8? I don't think so.
Back Row Grade: F
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