What a mess (spoilers)
What a mixed up mess.
I'm a sucker for SWAT, military tactical and related type films. Went in kind of expecting a sequel but didn't really care that it wasn't.
Opening theme music was recognizable, so I knew actual money was spent. But then actors starting appearing that let's just say they would be considered 'affordable'. Still, that doesn't discourage me if there's a decent story and film taking place.
At the opening scene I started forecasting what cool twist was going to happen, and unfortunately, my made-up, half-baked plots were actually far better and more interesting than anything that developed.
Oh! I bet the kid calling the police is luring the SWAT into a trap, which will set the conflict for the whole story. Nope, it was just some crazy kid wielding a big gun and telling the cops what to do. And for some reason they are listening to him.
I figured maybe I missed some significant information when the invaders whispered to him. Nope.
And when SWAT busts in they seem to know him. They call him by name and inexplicably refrain from blowing him away even though he's the most prominent armed threat. Maybe this is an edgy set up training exercise and they'll say the partygoers couldn't be informed because they might wreck the simulation. Maybe he's an off-duty SWAT team member. Maybe he's the police chief's meddlesome stepson. Nope.
Maybe it will all make sense later. Nope.
It was the same way throughout. Hmm, maybe Rose is really the villain and she's deliberately set in motion a plot to frame Walter Hatch! Nope. Just some lady who inexplicably offs herself for an unfulfilled reason.
To pass the time through this epic length 86 minute feature, the unused half of my mind was kind of questioning that massive number of unlikely or just bizarre things.
Why is the SWAT training master reluctant to go out and train? Oh, the weather and scenery are lacking? OK. But why is his boss giving him a blank check on the amount of pay? No police force in the world works that way. He's not a mercenary, he's a city worker. Pay is what it is.
On his arrival to meet the 4 cliches he'll be working with, I couldn't believe they spent what felt like 20 minutes on the guy eating the ice cream sundae. Just in case you miss the subtlety of the fudge all over his face, later he has a nice soliloquy about some delicious butterscotch sauce.
Let's not get started on how overplayed it got with the dramatic zoom on the guy just savoring the hell out of a cigarette.
So we've covered 'Chunky', and 'Smokey', but each guy had his own barely one dimensional character flaw, and you just knew coach was going to cure them and change their lives, all in this week's training.
In one moment, Detroit SWAT is so desperate to have Cutler's help, but in the next, there's zero cooperation. It goes further as his Detroit boss is constantly enraged at Cutler. I think Cutler was fired at least a couple of times yet inexplicable keeps on going.
The training involves key skills like hopping through tires and target shooting while listening to an MP3 player.
He brings in an implausibly hot model turned sniper trainer who works exclusively in low cut tops. For no reason, she's drawn to the least appealing SWAT guy, morphing from his hardass trainer to playfully resting her head on his shoulder the same day.
Cutler's on a two week mission to beef up the local SWAT team but he's so at home it looks like he's lived there his whole life. Will that be explained? Is there a local connection that might explain the conflict with Walter Hatch? Of course not.
They'll drop live arms training in an instant to rush off to various SWAT dispatch calls. Good thing too, since all the calls are in some way connected to the master villain.
That villain can work impossible magic with phones, but it's OK because the SWAT team's biggest juicehead can instantly patch into any building's phone system.
There's a news clip of Rose's suicide that says 'SWAT team loses hostage'. Well A, that's not what happened, and B, no news room would ever write that headline. But since it furthers the premise of Cutler's mythos, there it is. Like so much of the script, the words don't match the action. This occurs even to the end with the final certification payoff.
Cutler (an extreme stickler when it comes to disciplined training, formal testing, and calorie counting) is asked about the certification test. He says to consider the team certified. What??? What team? What certification? Only one guy survived, not counting the guy who was demoted down to the supply room. What little we saw, the team he trained all ineptly bumbled their way into traps and killed themselves. Cutler's training theme was speed over caution, and yet in the third act we see that speed is suicide and a little bit of caution would have gone a long way. I would dare say this is some of the worst SWAT training imaginable.
Maybe he meant they should certify the Paul Blart security guard they handed their biggest guy to on the way up the tower (again something I'm fairly sure is not out of any valid SWAT team handbook). Does Cutler want to certify someone that didn't train or participate? With a trail of dead hostages, dead bogeys, and the worst SWAT casualty rate of all team, Cutler declares Detroit SWAT is now 'certified'.
None of it makes any sense.