Really Surprised!

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I remember seeing, and liking, this when it first came out in 1977. I loved the introduction to Regan and Carter, hung over after a night of debauchery with an air hostess. 'The code word is air screw.' The initial murder scene of Lynda Bellingham's character sticks in the mind too. I found it believable and it sets the film off at a great pace.I loved the 70s British clothes. Look out for the ubiquitous green parka with the furry hood! We all had them. And the 70s British cars. They were brilliant once you got them started and before they rusted through. God, those stunt drivers could handle them.I loved the grittiness of it all and the convincing performances by Thaw, Waterman, Welland, Keen and Foster. I loved the details like the Private Eye hung up by Cater's toilet.Great plot and great snapshot of 70s British culture. 'All right, Tinkerbell, you're nicked'.

but the rough English cops of The Flying Squad (which, oddly enough, gets Sweeney from the Cockney rhyme for Flying Squad, Sweeney Todd!). Detectives Jack Regan (John Thaw) and George Carter (John Waterman) are our main characters as Regan begins to investigate the "suicide" of a working girl as a favor for an underworld figure friend/informant. Naturally, he uncovers a high level conspiracy and becomes the next target. A theatrical spin-off of the popular THE SWEENEY television series, SWEENEY! is my first exposure to the characters and it is fantastic. Thaw is outstanding as the gruff detective and he and Waterman have a great rapport. The film is peppered with some great (and really violent for the period) action pieces and location filming. I also like the realistic portrayal of the relationship between cops and crooks.

A no frills film in keeping with the series, the genre and the time.This is a film about edgy London police in an edgy London in the edgy 70's. You could of course substitute "edgy" for "dodgy" in the above sentence and it would still be true...For those of us around in the 70's it, like the series, is fantastically atmospheric. The hair, the clobber (look out for Regan's green anorak), the boozers, the motors, the women.The plot is far less important than the characters who are all superb, and a particular mention for the young (and very beautiful) Diane Keen, and to a lesser extent Linda Bellingham - whose nudity makes you look at those OXO adverts very differently (or it would if they were still on) The film also gives some extra scope to the relationship between Regan & Carter, and there are some edgy moments between the 2, starting with their morning-after-the-night-before and culminating in the dramatic ending and indeed the film's last words. One of the many things I liked about the Sweeney was its realism and how it didn't portray its main characters as heroes but showed their dark sides and their failures.I loved the TV Sweeney, for me John Thaw's (God rest his soul) Regan is one of, if not the, best TV characters of all time and this is an appropriate and very satisfying movie length "episode" Hollywood it ain't guv'nor, and for me thats what makes it the boll***s.

"Sweeney!" was one of the innumerable TV spin-offs which kept the British film business perilously afloat in the 1970s. For once this low-budget work did not spring from a sitcom but from Britain's best ever cop show, which made "Starsky and Hutch" look like "Sesame Street" with its relentless violence and raucous backchat. ("Sweeney Todd", it should be explained , is London rhyming slang for the Flying Squad, an elite detective unit of the Metropolitan Police.) Jack Regan and his sidekick George Carter here find themselves out of their depth with a bigger budget and canvas than on the boob tube: they get "webbed up"in an international conspiracy to lower, or raise, or something, oil prices. A suave Energy Minister is too fond of the high-class "brasses" furnished by his American PR agent. He is blackmailed, with multiple-murderous consequences and mucho ketchup.In some ways this is very much a 1970s period piece: flared trousers, two-tone grey telephones and no computers, police who drink and smoke heroically, ugly lowlifes, hideous pubs, tyre abuse, shootouts in junkyards and an overall grey, downbeat atmosphere which is a far cry from the Swinging London of Hollywood England in the previous decade. "Sweeney" was conceived at the moment of maximum crisis when OPEC was holding the industrialised nations to ransom, inflation was the highest for 60 years and trade unionists and militant socialists seemed poised to seize power in Blighty. True, a red double-decker bus figures during one chase, but the film makes concessions to mid-Atlanticism neither in casting, nor by moderating the constant Cockney badinage ("leave it aht!", "you wot?", "shut it!", "dull it isn't" (mocking a Met recruitment slogan)) nor by glamourising its high-life scenes. Also carried over from the series is the endless friction between different law enforcers: Regan clashes not only with his superior but with the security services and Special Branch, the Met's anti-subversion arm. Typically, he cocks up the operation to snatch the PRO and bring him to justice. Regan is no superhero.Contrary to what others have posted, I find Foster's accent and manner all too convincing, and his performance incisive. The theme of politicians being corrupted by their spin doctors remains fresh. Ian Bannen as the blackmailed MP looks and has a role not unlike Robert Vaughn's. Thaw and Waterman are the same crumpled reprobates as on the small screen, but the plot makes too little of their partnership; Regan is suspended and lone-wolfing it for much of the running time.No doubt the best of "The Sweeney" was on TV, but this is a fair-value distillation and introduction. It makes the mockney gangster movies of Mr Madonna and his posse look pathetic. "Up yours, sunshine!"