Film review: S.W.A.T. (12A)

THE familiar body armour, the dark vans, the macho grunts into radio mikes..... I've seen SWAT teams in a hundred other films but I still didn't know what it stands for.

Here those crazy people from Special Weapons and Tactics get a whole movie to themselves, where they get to shoot stuff and, er, blow things up.

Colin Farrell is copper Jim Street who gets thrown off the SWAT team with his shady partner, Brian Gamble.

The enraged Gamble quits but Farrell stays on in a demoted role in the hope of one day redeeming himself.

His chance comes when Dan 'Hondo' Harrelson (Jackson) puts together a special SWAT team that includes misfits like rap demigod LL Cool J and honey Michelle Rodriguez.

Sadly putting the squad together and getting them up to speed takes half the film. Yawn.

It finally gets back on story when smooth drugs overlord Alex Montel offers $100m to whoever can bust him out of custody - a neat idea that draws gangs of unfeasibly heavily armed hoods out for a gold rush.

Montel (Olivier Martinez) is one of the more charming points of this daft and noisy show. As the bad guy, he's French rather than the usual Englishman, so it seems the ripples of the Iraq war reach even bad action films.

Yes, SWAT is bad, like its inbred cousin Bad Boys II - though that was worse. Guns, explosions, guns. It's been done many times and with more character and more thought.

Farrell (way better in Intermission, which is currently showing) and Jackson are all right, and it's difficult not to get involved with some of the impressive action scenes.

But if they were going to take a dodgy old TV cop show and turn it into cinema, then I'd much rather have seen CHiPs.

Mono rating: five out of ten