TRAINING DAY Rater R 120 minutes Directed by Antoine Fuqua WHEN, WHERE Now playing: UA North, Trans-Lux Dream Catcher
It's a mean, bad world out there, and the guys with the responsibility to protect and serve sometimes have to be meaner and badder than the rest. That's the lesson veteran narcotics cop Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) devotes the training day of his rookie partner Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) to preaching. But just how mean and how bad? And who gets protected, and what gets served?
There's an operatic sweep to "Training Day", a score of foulness and violence that starts with small discords and swells up, up, and away into bombast, super-bombast, and finally oozes over the top into absurdity and cliché. To want to see this movie, you have to be willing to accept the kind of relentless, pounding violence that leaves faces a dripping pulp. A calloused ear for language is a help too. This is a movie that prides itself on not pulling any punches, verbal or physical.
Detective Alonzo Harris is a medieval warlord, running his fiefdom by laws of his own devising, ruling by power, terror, and the scattering of favors. Washington plays him with a charismatic swagger, charm wrapped thinly around a wrecking ball. It is hard to think of another star who could have elevated this character to a level that would justify the two hours this script demands of us. It's a performance that is likely to earn him another Oscar nomination, not because it's such a well-written role, but because Washington's huge talent riddles it with fascinating dramatic contradictions, and his scenery-chewing magnetism inflates it to proportions that demand attention.
It's a tough performance to have to share the screen with, and while Ethan Hawke battles gamely and sometimes effectively for his camera time, he often seems to be struggling just to breathe the depleted oxygen Washington has sucked away. His Jake is our eyes and ears on the inferno of Alonzo's through-the-looking-glass underworld, a good guy trying to conceal his naiveté and run with the big dogs, while at the same time trying to draw a line beyond which he will not betray his sense of ethics. "You remind me of myself," Alonzo is fond of saying when Jake erupts with principled resistance to his methods. But "in this world you gotta have a little dirt on you for people to trust you."
At first, the misery Alonzo puts Jake through seems like rough-hewn but good-natured hazing, but it gradually descends into the sadistic and the satanic. Jake sometimes seems unnecessarily naïve: "What if that guy makes a complaint?" he asks querulously after Alonzo has worked over a street lowlife. And yet even when Alonzo's actions seem unambiguously evil, he manages to pull another reversal and cast them as tough but necessary tactics in the battle against the bad guys. "You've got to decide whether you're a wolf or a sheep," he tells Jake, and in this impenetrable world of lawlessness it's hard to get a grasp of what's bad and what's worse.
There is an establishment, and Alonzo is a different and diffident man when he comes up against it. There's a nice scene in a coffee shop with three old pros, Harris Yulin, Raymond J. Barry, and lapsed leading man Tom Berenger as suits from the D.A.'s office waxing cynical about the legal system and warning Harris about the danger he faces from the Russian Mafia.
The movie's worst sins, if you discount its gargantuan appetite for violence and villainy, come in the form of desperate plot turns in the last twenty minutes or so. Most unforgivable is a deus ex machina reprieve that Jake gets when things look so grim that there should be no escape. It's like one of those cartoons in boys' magazines of yesteryear where the hero is dangling from a cliff with crocodiles snapping at his legs from below and lions closing in from above, and the challenge is to send in the winning suggestion for saving the poor guy. And after that it only gets worse, with scenes pilfered from old westerns and action-adventures and "Bonnie and Clyde". Director Antoine Fuqua ("Replacement Killers") has done a strong job up until then of measuring out the tension and tightening the net, but in the end he screws up badly, throwing in the directorial sponge as if he's succeeded in scaring himself and just wants out.
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