A
heap of movie critics (even Ebert) are throwing praise on “End of Watch” -– a visceral, bloody, gut-punch police drama/thriller than goes against the endless grain of cops as
corrupt, greedy, psychotic thugs -- as one of the best films of the year. It
could have been. Damn it comes close, often with pitch-perfect dialogue, and harshly with haunting violence. But gimmicks from 1999 abound with shaky-cam overload -- times 10.
Dig it James Ellroy style: Jake Gyllenhaal
gives his career-best showing (and he’s been good for years, especially in “Jarhead”)
as Brian Taylor, a veteran Marine now working a black-and-white on Los Angeles’
toughest streets, South Central, a land of shit streets, crap homes, and closed
businesses plagued by poverty, drugs, guns, and the growing power of Mexican drug
cartels that know no border. It’s a near Third World, except the bad guys carry
gold-plated AK-47s in some sick “Scarface” fantasy world come true.
Taylor’s partner
is Mike Zavala, a Hispanic-American with a wife and 3.5 children, played by Michael Pena. The men are
brothers. Not by blood. But the job. Each will take a bullet or more for one
another. No questions asked. The men bullshit banter in the squad car in the best
movie back-and-forth since “Pulp Fiction,” but when the hammer drops, they are stone
silent and careful, especially when they stumble upon a massive crime spree of
human-trafficking and other horrors all right under their noses. They also “fight” the “parents,” that is, the Sarge and all the powers-that-be at work, but playfully. Zavala is the settled one, smart and cautious, Taylor is gung-ho and first out of the car.
The film,
written and directed by David Ayer (he wrote Training Day”) drops us in this
L.A. Story with no escape, and he shows the ugliest scenes –- ghastly murders, grpahic assaults, endless deaths, and child abuse -– with no let up. The settings never smack of a film set, or some obvious stand-in. I have never been to South Central L.A., but this feels real, down to the litter and alleys and bars on house windows.
But damn it, where Ayer goes maddeningly wrong is
in a ridiculous decade-old plot contrivance that has Taylor touting around digital cameras
24/7 to film his life on the job for an art class. (We never see the guy in class, despite his wanting to earn a law degree.) For all the on-the-street realism
Ayers constantly pushes, I call “bullshit” on any relatively intelligent officer
anywhere in the world, much less South Central L.A., that would enter potential
hot spots and crime scenes carrying a freakin’ camera in one mitt and one-handing
his side arm in the other. Especially for a Marine such as Taylor.
Even what little I know as an ex-crime reporter, when entering an unknown location, searching room by room, any police officer keeps his hands,
both hands, on his or her weapon because that weapon will save his or her life. Nothing.
Else. Matters. Disagree? Ask a cop. Ask a soldier, for that matter. (If your partner chooses a Sony over a Glock, seriously, trade the hell up.) Call it a movie, sure. I get it, fantasy. But, guess what? The soulless
gang members also happen to carry around cameras to share their exploits. For
art class, too? YouTube? All this “Blair Witch” shaky-cam crap is mixed in with
normal cinema capture, from the sky, floor, whatever, after Taylor’s camera
is down.
I dig and appreciate Ayer’s attempts at showing what policemen and women face
each day, the gallows humor they (absolutely true) employ to stay sane, and a
refusal to show every cop as worse than the bad guys (I’m look at you “Freelancers”
and “Safe” and 1,005 other films), but he should have stuffed the gimmicks and played the film straight. This seriously could have been well atop my Top 10 List of the year. But for the gimmicks.
God bless Pena. A consistently
great actor in “Crash” and “The Lincoln Lawyer” and a few dozen other films, he
gives an amazingly tough, smart, funny, and humane performance here. His officer is a full human being, jumping off the page. Watch his horrified
silent reaction as he comes across a squalid dungeon full of Mexicans held as drug-runner
slaves, and, damn, the man deserves an Oscar nomination. And leading man status on par with Gyllenhaal and any other actor out there. B
