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The Sweeney – The Bleeding Cool Review

There are so many ironic but affectionate movie versions of classic TV shows that they're almost a subgenre of their own. As we saw from Starsky & Hutch, 21 Jump Street, or a zillion others, the trick is to play it for laughs, haul in a couple of the original stars for cameos and wrap it up with a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign.

If you'd been reckless enough to give me £3m to make a Sweeney movie that's almost certainly what I would have done. I'd probably have hired a director like…say…terminally unfashionable hooligan auteur Nick Love. Maybe go with a demographic touchstone like Geezer-God Ray Winstone…knock out a script peppered with Seventies gangland argot and call it a job well done.

But that isn't, despite what you might glean from the posters, quite what has happened here.

Nick Love is not a director universally adored by the critics. He makes stag night favourites such as The Firm and The Football Factory. But with The Sweeney he has shown a range of ambition well beyond the obvious. If makes another one this good I think it's time he was reassessed. There are a few genuine flashes of directorial flair.

In this version of The Sweeney Jack Regan is described by those around him as a dinosaur. He's all bravado, beergut and bluster. His dialogue is studded with phrases that wouldn't have seemed out of place in, say, a gritty Seventies cop show. He isn't really a detective, he's a bruiser. He's far more likely to use a baseball bat than a DNA profile. So far, so predictable.

He's surrounded by a photogenically young and hungry crew led by Ben Drew (or, if you follow the modern popular music, Plan B). The team's glamour is supplied by Captain America's squeeze Hayley Atwell who, as Nancy Lewis, is somewhat implausibly married to Regan's nemesis – a weaselly Internal Affairs investigator played by Steven Mackintosh. Regan's crew are young, hungry coppers who don't play by the rules and don't even work in a police station. Instead they hang around in a deserted Docklands office block waiting for trouble to start.

The team soon fades away though leaving the action to boil down to what we loved about the original series. Regan and Carter zipping around London in an undistinguished motor looking for heads to crack. It's no more plausible than, say, The Long Good Friday or the  two John Thaw / Dennis Waterman Sweeney movies. Incident trumps authenticity here every time. Then again a really realistic modern police procedural would involve so much paperwork it'd probably make a better PowerPoint presentation than a movie.

Nick Love's Sweeney remains true to the blokey spirit of the TV action series of the same name. It's a fast-moving modern thriller that – although it suffers by comparison with its bigger, glossier, crucially more expensive American cousins – delivers appreciable bang per buck. Or more appropriately punch per pound. It just doesn't quite, if we're being honest, have quite enough scale to make it feel like a movie. We needed higher stakes, and a touch more scope.

If this take on The Sweeney had been carved into two one-hour chunks and been shown on consecutive nights on ITV, I think we'd all be hailing it as a television classic. As a movie, notwithstanding one epic chase through Central London, it's not quite cinematic enough.

And no amount of architecture-porn helicopter shots of Docklands at night are going to change that. It may be just a personal thing of mine but I've had my fill of that particular shot now. There have been enough aerial shots of a city at night that everyone who has ever walked past a television knows what cities look like from a helicopter after dark. My dog knows what a city looks like from the air after dark. And his bedtime is 8pm. And he can't fly.

That aside everyone involved in this operation; Love, Winstone, Atwell and (especially) Drew has done a decent job. The script's a workmanlike caper that – barring one outrageously wedged-in piece of gratuitous Ray Winstone fanservice – belts along like a souped-up Granada. There's nothing to fault in the cinematography or the effects. It just feels more like telly than film.

Bearing in mind that it was made on a budget of around three per cent of the sum Lionsgate wagered on Expendables 2, that's not the biggest shock in the world. You could probably have made this version of The Sweeney for what The Avengers spent on shawarma.

If you asked me to guess, I'd say The Sweeney will turn out to be a mid-sized DVD hit, sitting alongside the rest of Love's laddish oeuvre on single men's bookcases across the UK.

But as a warning that Love aspires to something more than that, it's powerfully effective. I hope one day someone gives him a budget that's bigger than the haul from a high street bank job to see what he does with it.

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