If you were looking for that sort of on-screen performance that steals your idealism for a couple hours but gives it back to you at the end after the bad guys get what they deserve, you should see a different movie.
Training Day might make you rethink a career in the LAPD, but it definitely provides enough action and intensity to keep audience viewers glued to their seats as they follow the first very, very, long day for rookie trainee narcotics officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke).
The movie offers up a tale of opposites: bright-eyed Hoyt, full of righteousness and ready to clean up the streets, and veteran narcotics detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), whose methods of dishing out street justice, to put it mildly, differ slightly from the Police Academy training books.
Harris’ Narcotics 101 teaching mantra is relatively simple: “To catch the wolf, you gotta be the wolf.” That is to say, his pupil’s first few lessons, like taking a few hits of PCP-laced marijuana just to learn the taste of it and beating up a couple of would-be rapists in a back alley, aren’t quite what Hoyt expected so early in the morning.
And you thought your first day at New South was an experience?
Washington delivers an admirably convincing performance as the corrupt, hard-edged Harris, certainly the cop you wouldn’t ever want to meet—even if he caught you jaywalking in your own suburban neighborhood. And while the movie tries to focus on Hoyt’s steady loss of idealism, Washington dominates the performance. He issues fake warrants as effortlessly as he spews out some notable one-liners—“You gotta get a little dirt on you before people are gonna trust you,” he tells Hoyt. His one long monologue to Hoyt in the car after having staged the capture of a noted coke dealer (Scott Glenn) is by itself a piece of brutal, real-world psychology that might make you think twice about how the police really work in your own neighborhood.
The acting includes a couple of sub-par cameo appearances from rappers Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre (Snoop’s five-minutes of fame as a disabled crack dealer just don’t scream out Oscar), but Hawke’s Hoyt has more depth than most viewers might expect, although it still wouldn’t be enough to keep audiences glued to their seats. It wouldn’t be easy to drag your friends to Arlington Courthouse to see an action movie with just Ethan Hawke and, well, some other actor that wasn’t Denzel Washington.
Training Daycould probably have survived as simply a story of stark opposites without even the need for a complex plot, so it was both surprising and delighting that Director Antoine Fuqua included one in the movie. But then it was perplexing, a little confusing and then a little annoying. Harris’ mysterious Russian connection isn’t well developed, and all that we learn about it comes from a group of Mexicans (vaguely connected to Harris), whose direct role in the plot isn’t well developed. Frankly, the audience could have ignored or at least been confused by the entire scene and still enjoyed the movie. Alonzo’s connections to a few higher-ups in the LAPD, the “wise men,” as he calls them, give the impression of high-level corruption at work, but don’t ask how everything’s connected because we never know.
The last few scenes are certainly worth waiting for—mostly likely because the movie re-focuses on its strength, the implicit battles between Harris and Hoyt, idealism and pragmatism. Ethan Hawke’s character learns a few lessons, but even more impressively, he doesn’t end with a clear set of good and bad guys. In fact, its refreshing realism might be the film’s greatest strength. It more than effectively captures the rough L.A. neighborhoods, and strips away any notion you might have that fighting crime isn’t a dirty business.
Its high intensity makes Training Daya two-hour thriller. You can forget the plot, because Denzel Washington’s performance alone makes this movie a must-see.
