The Sweeney (2012)

There are a few types/genres of movies that bore me to tears but none more so than cop dramas and war dramas. These two types of movies I feel like if you have seen one you have basically seen them all. I am not saying there are not great war movies or great cop movies it is just there are so many. Cop movies especially drive me a little nuts. With cop movies there are like three kinds of stories: a good cop who gets caught in a bad situation and has to fight dirty to clear his name; a fellow officer is killed in the line of duty and that officer’s partner is determined to find out who killed him; a few guys in the department are crooked and it is up to one officer to bring the bad guys or bad guy to justice. Ugh, how boring. The Sweeney kind of follows the second type of story but it was nothing really different from others and was not that great.

            The Sweeney is a unit of the British police squad that does not exactly follow usual protocol. All the officers fight dirty and take drastic and physical measures to ensure they bring down the bad guys. One Sweeney unit is lead by an older, bad ass, take-no-shit guy named Joe Reagan. The team includes about five other people but Reagan counts on Nancy Lewis (Haley Atwell) and George Carter. For Nancy he counts on sex mostly. George is like a son to Joe and trusts him with everything. Reagan constantly has the boss of the group, Frank Haskins (Damien Lewis), down his back as well as Nancy’s husband, Ivan, who works for Internal Affairs and is looking for an excuse to shut the unit down for being harsh among other things.

            The unit is brought in a jewelry store robbery. The robbery was odd. The store was small but not everything was taken and a girl in the store was shot execution style for what seemed like no reason. This robbery rubs Reagan the wrong way. He sees a pattern in the way the safe was broken into and come across a known criminal named Francis Allen. Reagan viciously goes after Allen until it is proved that Allen was not in the country at the time of the robbery.

            Another robbery occurs this time at a high end bank in Trafalgar Square. The Sweeney responds to the call. Haskins told Reagan to pull back from the pursuit of two of the robbers but does not listen. He pursues the robbers with Nancy to an underground car park. Nancy back up to a car but she does not see one of the robbers in the back. The guy takes her and the other tries to speed away. Reagan manages to get close enough to shoot the robber holding Nancy. She jumps out of the car but lands weird and cannot get up. The driver of the car comes back and shoots Nancy dead.

            Now Reagan is on the warpath to find whoever committed the jewelry store robbery. Ivan suspends the unit. He puts Reagan under twenty-four hour watch and takes away his badge and freezes his accounts so he cannot go after people on his own. That does not stop Reagan. His inability to stop lands him jail for a bit.

            The Sweeney was alright. I am gonna be totally honest and say I watched this for Hayley Atwell because I have such a massive girl crush on her right now (AGENT CARTER!!!!). Of course I was very pissed when her character died (I knew it was going to happen, though, as soon as she went with Reagan after the two robbers). The woman is totally bad ass! The opening scene was pretty cool when everyone was going after some robbers in a warehouse. Atwell looked like a boss roughly taking down some guys. Atwell’s character’s relationship with Reagan was really weird. I could not get behind that because it was just odd. He looked like he could have been her father for crying out loud! Hearing Damien Lewis with a British accent was so weird! I am so used to seeing him either on Homeland or Band of Brothers where he was playing an American. After a while the story got boring and a bit confusing. I thought the idea of The Sweeney being a group of bad ass cops who go in guns blazing and kick the shit out of people was pretty awesome at first but then it fell flat. To me there seemed to be plot holes or some things were just not explained. But that could be down to me not really paying as much attention to what was happening as I should have. Or maybe it was because my damn Netflix in my room was having a fit with the crappy wifi in my house is so damn terrible and it kept stopping for minutes at a time to reboot! Anyway, The Sweeney was not like God awful to where I would say never see it. Just know that it kind of plays out like a typical cop movie and the character of Joe Reagan can get a little annoying after a while.