The Sweeney - WARNING: Danny Dyer not included

I read a few posts on the internet about how mainstream cinema is pillaging the classics due to a lack of new ideas. Now, I have never watched the TV show 'The Sweeney' (in fact, I had to be told that `Sweeney' was cockney rhyming slang for `Sweeney Todd/Flying Squad') so I can't compare the film version to it source material.

However, if you can get your head round the fact that there is a movie set in London that DOESN'T feature Danny Dyer, then you might enjoy it for being a pretty solid British cop/heist movie.

We're introduced to 'The Sweeney,' i.e. a hard-as-nails bunch of London police officers, who deal with bank robberies, led by Ray Winstone. They were happily going about their business roughing up criminals when their department is suddenly invaded by one of those awful pencil-necked, desk-jockeys, i.e. an Internal Affairs man, hell-bent on cleaning up their act. If that wasn't bad enough, they have to find a team of robbers who went as far as to execute an innocent member of the public during a recent raid.

It trundles along quite nicely.  The 'Sweeney' department consists of about twelve officers, although we only really get to know about four or five of them during the screen time (maybe if this was still a TV show all the others would have got their turn centre stage, but not this time).  The car chases are nothing to write home about, but there is a pretty tense shoot-out in and around Trafalgar Square which is like the British version of a similar gun battle in the Pacino/DeNiro thriller 'Heat.'

If you're looking for gritty and hard-nosed police, action films (and can put up with a sprinkling of cockney clichés and suspend your disbelief long enough to believe that Hayley Atwell would genuinely find Ray Winstone REALLY attractive) then you should enjoy this.  If it does have a major downside, it's that there are quite a few cliches thrown in there.  I've already mentioned the stuffy Internal Affairs man, but there's also plenty more that I won't list here, as they do tend to fall under 'spoiler' territory.  The ending is also a bit sudden.  I was expecting a more 'epic setting' than a caravan park for the final (major) scene of the movie.  But, apart from those minor flaws, there's enough here for you to appreciate if you're into British crime/cop films.

Plus, I should warn you: just as there's no Danny Dyer, there's not as much screen-time dedicated to Damian Lewis as there probably should be.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that