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80One of those guilty pleasures of the summer. It’s also one of those action movies that could have been ruined if Jerry Bruckheimer had taken charge of it.
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80As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.
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75One of the best cop thrillers since "Training Day."
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75Directed by Clark Johnson in an efficient and occasionally exhilarating style that points to the Emmy-winner's TV cop-show pedigree ("Homicide," "The Wire," "NYPD Blue").
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75Aware of its own cuteness because the dialogue plays by the rules of meta-entertainment.
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70While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.
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70Offers up the kind of pleasures that only a summer movie can...The cast is good-looking, the soundtrack is loud, the plot is stupid.
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63The standout in the cast is James Todd Smith, whose acting talent may soon persuade him to shed his adolescent stage name of LL Cool J and concentrate on mainstream film roles.
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63The strongest parts of the film aren't these money shots, but the buildup to the gunplay.
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60Formula is now the name of the game, although a steady diet of stunts and shootouts ensures that the audience is never bored.
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60A thoroughly unremarkable police action movie starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson.
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60As summer shoot-'em-ups go, this is pretty well executed, with plenty of macho posing and gunfire.
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50Noisy, standard-issue cop actioner.
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50What we have here is a model for the paint-by-numbers, perfectly generic, proudly soulless summer action flick. An original idea would die for lack of oxygen in S.W.A.T.
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50S.W.A.T. boasts the kernel of a good idea - but it gets buried in the chaff of half-baked plot threads, partly realized characters and unstructured pandemonium.
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50By the time you've given up guessing whether S.W.A.T. wants to be a half-serious action pic or just affably jokey, its storytelling has turned so ludicrously melodramatic that it doesn't matter.
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50Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.
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50Likely won't please fans of the original TV series, but the movie hasn't been made for them.
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50Actor-turned-director Clark Johnson uses the flashy, up-to-the-minute editing and camera stunts action fans expect, but keeps the mayhem on a recognizably human scale — it's big, but not insanely overblown.
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50It's just one more competent but routine, midlevel ($70 million) late-summer action movie filled with the usual explosions, shootouts and male bonding.
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50There is something sneakily gratifying about all this: Not since the days of "Earthquake" have Hollywood producers so indulged their fantasies of trashing the town.
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50Serviceable, wholly uninspired.
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50Though the film's second half has some good action moments, it never fulfills the promise of its earliest scenes.
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50I was all revved up to have a whale of a fascist good time, and S.W.A.T. left me let down and pissed-off.
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50Coming in the wake of the physically astonishing "Bad Boys 2," S.W.A.T. seems square.
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40Mostly standard-issue muddle.
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38Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.
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38A compendium of missed opportunities, uninspired action and clichés so tired, you wish the screenwriters had called 911, too.
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Lots of buildings and cars explode, but there isn't a spark between any of the characters.
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38S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.
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30Surely something more original than this could have been mined from the history of North America’s largest and most professional police force. As it is, though, Johnson’s film is just firing blanks.
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25SWAT is better than "Gigli," but so is most outpatient surgery.
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20Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.
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10A prototypical new-millennium summer movie, S.W.A.T. is no more than an extended trailer for itself.
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10Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 26
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Mixed: 4 out of 26
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Negative: 5 out of 26