Review of Training Day (2001) by Matt G — 15 Nov 2013

Much as 2001's "Training Day" goes to great lengths to create a gritty atmosphere that evokes an authentic, kitchen sink real sort of danger, I can't quite shake the feeling that not a thing about it is as pragmatic as director Antoine Fuqua might want you to believe. (If only because it goes to zero to sixty so quickly that things start to seem more blatantly cinematic than menacingly street smart.) But when its believability falters, its actors pick up the pieces and set their surroundings on fire, and since the film hardly finds a single moment not plagued by visceral danger, they're all "Training Day" has to convince us that in front of us is more than a bunch of lip-smacking tough talk.

Ethan Hawke, young and ambitious, stars as Jake Hoyt, an LAPD officer in the process of working his way up to the top of the narcotics sector of the conglomerate. The film follows the twenty-four-period during which he's evaluated for possible promotion by Detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), a highly respected narcotics commissioner. Though Hoyt expects nothing more than a routine excursion, a few hours of perusing through the streets with a couple of forays into deep-rooted, down and dirty preparation, little can ready him for the living hell that is working alongside Harris.

To Harris, a successful officer must stoop to the levels of the criminals they're arresting - violence should always be one's first instinct, and thievery is a treat to be taken advantage of. Consuming confiscated drugs are not out of the question.

Most in Hoyt's situation would perhaps instantaneously jump out of Harris's car in order to avoid getting themselves into a stew of a legal mess, but the former wants nothing more than to serve his community to the best of his ability. If he has to wiggle around the constraints of his moral standards in order to do so, so be it.

But as the day treads along and Harris's detours into supposed crime fighting get increasingly hazardous and increasingly embedded in perilous self-interest, Hoyt cannot help himself from questioning if letting loose for the sake of building a career is really worth it - or if traveling down deep into the underbellies in which Harris commits most of his wrongdoings are good places to go for shady intrigue.

The film eventually explodes into a finale that serves as even more of an all-too-simple letdown a la "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (only we're given the opposite of a life or death bromance). But because all leading up to it is so scrumptiously savage, I can excuse screenwriter David Ayer's decision to move toward an easy-way-out wrap up. It's more "Sleuth" than "Dirty Harry," and conversation, ambience, and swagger are definitively more important than a story that sings in its naturalism.

But that's also my largest lament. "Training Day" is too operatic for a movie that's supposed to essentially work as a near docudrama regarding police brutality and corruption. Its biggest strength - and biggest weakness - is Alonzo Harris, who is played by Washington with astonishing intensity. While a fascinating creation of bureaucratic evil, Harris proves to have the dimension of a 1960s Bond villain, all cackling maleficence without a trace of humanization. The role is beautifully performed, but I much prefer Hawke's Hoyt, who's genuinely portrayed as a big-eyed hopeful way in over his head.

"Training Day" flourishes, though, in creating a world so riddled with crime and hopelessness that the sneaking sensation of fear becomes a given. In order to authenticate its setting, Fuqua insisted many of the movie's scenes be shot in the most treacherous streets of Los Angeles, and the inducing of a rough riding ghetto is lucid. But because the material is more overwrought than snakily dangerous, we never forget that we're watching a movie and not a true crime explosion, and for a film so intent on making a statement, that's a fatal flaw.