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Review: 'The Sweeney' Is Cliché After Cliché To The Point Of Parody

By Gabe Toro
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March 3, 2013 11:22 AM
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6 Comments

Reviews

"We’re The Sweeney, and you’ve just been nicked," barks Ray Winstone (plus or minus a few expletives) about three separate times during U.K. actioner "The Sweeney," and it’s the biggest tip-off that this is based on an established property. "The Sweeney" never made it stateside, though the television series ran for four seasons in the '70s; a cop show that broke new ground in depicting the British boys in blue as both fallible and heroically corrupt and on the take as they smashed heads to keep citizens safe from violent crime.

By Drew Taylor
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March 2, 2013 1:20 PM
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0 Comments

Interviews

Ray Winstone is one of those brilliant actors who has a chameleonic ability to totally lose himself in his characters (whether it’s the retired thief in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant “Sexy Beast” or the Bostonian gangster in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed”), while remaining 100% Winstonian. In his new film, “The Sweeney,” an adaptation of a hugely influential '70s British cop series, Winstone plays Jack Regan, a morally nebulous leader of a crack crime force. We got to talk to the actor about adapting such an iconic series, what it was like working with British rapper Plan B, and how he goes about choosing his roles. We also bugged him about motion capture animation, the fate of Nick Cave’s “The Death of Bunny Munro,” what “Noah” was like, and if he had any dirt on filming the infamous “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (yes he was in that).

By Kevin Jagernauth
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February 26, 2013 10:58 AM
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1 Comment

News

While on this side of the ocean "The Sweeney" may not be a familiar title, in the UK it's something of a touchstone. The British crime series only ran for four seasons during the 1970s, but it was enough to make a tremendous creative and cultural impact, serving as inspiration for recent show "Life On Mars." And while "The Sweeney" spawned two films in 1977 and 1978, it has been refreshed for a new generation, bringing cops Jack Regan and John Carter back into action.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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February 7, 2012 10:01 AM
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3 Comments

Features

'Polymath' is a word that describes Ben Drew pretty well. The 29 year old East London native first came to fame back in 2005 under the name Plan B, where his work on influential mixtape "Run The Road" landed him a contract with 679 Records, and his album "Who Needs Action When You Got Words," landed the following year too all kinds of acclaim.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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January 4, 2012 11:02 AM
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1 Comment

News

In Hollywood, barely anything is greenlit without the prospect of a sequel already percolating in the minds of studio executives (you can be sure that somewhere, there's a serviette with plot outlines for "We Bought A Zoo Too," "J. Edgars" and "My Week With Marilyn: Tokyo Drift"), but in the U.K., this phenomenon is much rarer. It's hard enough to get a film made, let alone get anyone to see the thing, and thus it's not often that filmmakers count their chickens before they hatch and start development on a sequel without knowing that they've got a hit in the bag.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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October 28, 2011 1:37 AM
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5 Comments

'Homeland' Lead Damian Lewis & Steven Mackintosh Also In Cast"Captain America: The First Avenger" was a funny one, wasn't it? The first half was the best superhero of the year, the second, a plotless, uneven mess. But it had many pleasures, and first among them was Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter. Given an unusually well-drawn female character for a comic book movie to get her teeth into, the British actress, a relative unknown in the U.S. who took the role after it was turned down by the likes of Keira Knightley and Emily Blunt, knocked it out of the park, proving feisty, kick-ass, and vulnerable, often within the same scene, showing wider audiences what many have known since her debut in BBC drama "The Line of Beauty" -- she's going to be a massive star.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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April 5, 2011 1:24 AM
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2 Comments

'Trainspotting' Writer John Hodge To Pen ScriptAs a seminal British TV cop show, "The Sweeney," which followed Flying Squad members Carter (Dennis Waterman) and Regan (John Thaw) as they bust heads across London, has long proved influential in the genre -- it's more or less the total inspiration for popular sci-fi series "Life on Mars" -- and it's no surprise that a big-screen reboot has been in the works for years. The film came within weeks of filming in 2008, with Ray Winstone as Regan and Michael Fassbender as Carter, but Fox Searchlight balked at a relatively high (for the U.K.) $16 million budget, and the plug was pulled.

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Review: 'The Sweeney' Is Cliché After Cliché To The Point Of Parody

Interview: 'The Sweeney' Star Ray Winstone Talks Rappers, Filming Aronofsky's 'Noah' & How Much Fun He Had On 'Indiana Jones'

Watch: Exclusive Clip From 'The Sweeney' Introduced By Ray Winstone

Ben Drew (AKA Plan B) Talks About His Feature Directorial Debut 'Ill Manors' & Starring Alongside Ray Winstone In 'The Sweeney'

Sequel To Ray Winstone TV Revival 'The Sweeney' Already In The Works Before First Film Is Released

'Captain America' Star Hayley Atwell Joins Ray Winstone & Plan B In TV Cop Remake 'The Sweeney'

Ben Drew (aka Plan B) To Star Opposite Ray Winstone In 'The Sweeney'

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