YMMV / S.W.A.T. (2003)

• Accidental Aesop: When they first arrest Montel, two characters give contradictory commands. While this doesn't mean that violent resistance is acceptable, it does illustrate how hard it can be to obey the commands of police officers when being arrested.
• Fair for Its Day: While there is some Values Dissonance in Hondo's contempt for the rules and abiding by the blue wall of silence, the film is surprisingly nuanced for a 2003 Cowboy Cop movie. Street may not cooperate with the investigation into Gamble's recklessness, but the film makes it clear that Gamble deserved punishment for his recklessness and that he should have been disciplined long before that point, with Street accepting his demotion and showing some regret for covering for Gamble throughout their partnership. While SWAT tactics get an Elites Are More Glamorous portrayal, Hondo and his team focus on saving lives rather than ending them throughout the film (even extending this attitude toward a non-career criminal hostage taker). The applicant who Hondo rejects for not using force is subjected to some ridicule from Hondo, but he also demonstrates that non-confrontational policing is sometimes feasible in a Boring, but Practical way. Even Fuller, Da Chief, is a nuanced and often logical character rather than being portrayed as a strawman just for hating Cowboy Cops.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Jeremy Renner going rogue against Samuel L. Jackson's organization before it was cool!
  • Ten years later, Michelle Rodriguez engages in another car chase to prevent the Big Bad's plane from taking off with his hostages.
  • Deacon Kay relays what he would do if he had huge amounts of money that Alex Montel offers: he would hire Halle Berry as his personal trainer. This is within earshot of Montel. In real life, Olivier Martinez, who plays Montel, would marry Halle Berry in 2013.
  • The "Polish hostage" played by David St. James is apparently paranoid of robot aliens (as he says "It's the damn robot aliens!" when Street uses his "Key to the City" weapon to breach the house). St. James would have a bit part as a NASA scientist in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which is about a robot alien invasion.
  • Colin Farrell and Jeremy Renner—who play bitter enemies in this film—went on to play Bullseye in Daredevil (2003) and Hawkeye in The Avengers (2012), two Marvel Comics characters known for their marksmanship skills. Amusingly, Bullseye actually became Hawkeye in Marvel's Dark Reign storyline.
    • For extra points, Farrell's character in this movie is a hero while Renner is one of the villains. This is the inverse for the Marvel characters they are known for playing.
  • How cool is it that LL Cool J lands a role in a film, based on a TV show whose very theme he happened to use in a rap song ("I'm Bad") 16 years earlier?
• Nightmare Fuel: The opening shootout can induce chills if you're listening to the police radio traffic that goes on between dispatchers and the cops engaging the bank robbers before the SWAT team shows up. The actual police chatter from the real Hollywood shootout, and paraphrased in the film, is, "We can't stop'em. They have automatic weapons, there's nothing we have that can stop them."
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jeremy Renner was a relatively obscure character actor when he was cast as Gamble in this movie. He wouldn't achieve widespread recognition until The Hurt Locker started generating Oscar buzz five years later. Then, of course, there was his appearance as Clint Barton in The Avengers,^note He actually debuted in Thor but more people saw Avengers. which finally propelled him to superstardom a big nine years after this movie came out.
  • The lady who gives the officers a hard time for arresting a black guy is Octavia Spencer, who went on to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress playing Minny Jackson in The Help.
• Signature Scene:
  • The opening hostage standoff and its aftermath are pretty well-known for how it has both fast-paced action and deconstructs an archetypal Cowboy Cop moment with a series of Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes.
  • The scene of a bunch of gang-bangers attack a police convoy to try and spring the captive Montel is familiar even to some people who haven't seen the whole movie due to how strategic and well-armed the gangbangers are, to the point of having better tactics than the cops, and how it is a memorable part of the trailer.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The trailers made it look like SWAT would have to fight off hordes of criminal gangs after Martinez's hundred million dollar offer to free him. There's exactly one attack by one gang, before SWAT is betrayed by one of their own for the money.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film came out near the end of the summer of 2003, right at the height of the Bush era — and it shows:
  • Tellingly, the villain is a thoroughly despicable French criminal who's repeatedly subjected to anti-French epithets stemming from the French opposing the invasion of Iraq.
  • The Latina Token Girl on the S.W.A.T. team is mockingly called "J. Lo" once by Gamble. Back then, Jennifer Lopez was still a household name before Gigli put her career on the decline.
  • Hondo refusing to accept an applicant with a perfect record into S.W.A.T., partly owing to his eating a vegetarian hot dog, which Hondo considers to be inherently untrustworthy. Even for the standards of the time this was wild, but by modern standards, where almost every fast food joint has vegan meat substitutes on the menu, it's downright ludicrous.
  • The portrayal of the rough-and-tumble methods used by the S.W.A.T. team. LL Cool J's character bashes a civilian for her "liberal" views after she dares to criticize him for roughing up an African-American perp in South Central (though it's worth noting that four out of the five characters in the scene, Street excepted, are black), and there's a scene where the two main characters mock a S.W.A.T. candidate because he's never had a civilian complaint against him and prides himself on handling every past situation nonviolently. Considering the large-scale controversy and protests against Police Brutality and the militarization of police in The New '10s, which made police reform a hot-button issue, these scenes couldn't possibly pass a test audience a decade later.
• Values Dissonance: Jim Street is shunned by fellow SWAT officers, and questioned by Hondo, over the suspicion that he stayed on the force when his partner Gamble didn't because Street ratted Gamble out for disobeying orders.^note He didn't: the commanders planned to keep them both in the division but Gamble Rage Quit over being kicked off the SWAT Team, and then Street turned down Captain Fuller's offer anyway. Hondo also drops a S.W.A.T. candidate for seemingly not being willing enough to use force. Beginning in the 2010s, there's been increased public scrutiny over police misconduct in the United States, and coverups of same by fellow officers (the so-called "blue wall of silence"), which can make these concern seem unpleasant.

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