Review of End of Watch (2012) by Kenneth L — 10 Jun 2013

Although there were definitely some puzzling choices made in the creation of this film, it's still overall a very gripping and engaging movie. It's quite possibly the most down-to-earth, realistic cop movie I've ever seen - while there are some moments of intense action, the movie always feels utterly plausible. There is something of a plot holding it together, but really the movie is all about the two main characters, showing us above all that cops are people too.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña play the two young police officers the movie focuses on. They're just a couple of ordinary, relatable guys whose task is to patrol the streets of particularly bad parts of Los Angeles. The movie moves between scenes of them on the job and their personal lives, while gradually moving forward with a plot connecting several of the crime scenes they stumble upon.

The thing that bothered me initially about the movie was the main conceit of its visual style. It's another hand-held camera, "found footage" movie like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, with the premise that Jake Gyllenhaal's character is recording everything they do for a film class project. That's fine, except it quickly becomes apparent that probably fewer than half of the shots in the movie can actually be accounted for by a camera existing within the diegesis of the film. Sometimes it's a camera in the car or in the character's hands, but much of the time it's apparently just a magic camera floating in the middle of nowhere. Most movies that go with the found-footage concept commit to it 100%, even when they have to stretch it like in Chronicle, but this movie goes in and out of found footage as it feels the need. It's really just an excuse to shoot the whole movie in a handheld, shaky-cam style, which is an acceptable decision, but they could also have just done that without bringing the found footage idea into it at all. So the contradiction here threw me off for a while at the beginning of the movie, but eventually I just went with it.

Fortunately, the movie is sufficiently grounded by the performances of Gyllenhaal and Peña that it doesn't just become a lot of chaos. Peña in particular gives an incredibly convincing and realistic portrayal of his character. I've never been consciously aware of Peña before this movie, but he really does hold the movie together here. Gyllenhaal is good too, but his character is slightly goofier. Anna Kendrick shows up as Gyllenhaal's girlfriend, but doesn't have time to be much more than a pretty face (something Kendrick excels at, of course, but she's not getting any Oscar nominations for this one).

Overall, it is a good movie, and possibly the best portrayal of the realities of day-to-day police work ever. But the usualy shaky-cam annoyances, and the inconsistency of trying to figure out who's shooting what and then realizing that lots of shots are "by" no one, keep it from being as good as it could have been.