At The Movies

With David Begelman

“End of Watch”

Cops and Robbers Redux

 

You’re in for a surprise watching writer/director David Ayer’s film “End of Watch.” The movie at first seems to be an exercise in cinematic realism. There are generous sprinklings of the F-word, terms of salutation like “dude,” not to mention effects introduced by a wobbly camera. Rumor has it that the flick is in part a triumph of “found-footage,” a semi-documentary style of cinematography that celebrates improvisation. But an abiding romanticism is the film’s undercover strain.

Try as it may, this flick’s depiction of the gritty world of street crime contrasts with a tender-hearted (if not somewhat mawkish) ode to the purity of the relationship of its heroes, officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peňa). The two are LAPD policemen who daily patrol the crime-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles in their car. The same guileless quality characterizes the relationships they have with their women: a girlfriend, Janet (Anne Kendrick) and Peňa’s wife Gabba (Natalie Martinez). The pairings are matches made in an improbable heaven, with barely a trace of conflict or tension we are accustomed to witnessing in most relationships. They’ve led one critic to lodge the lament, “Where’s a corrupt cop when you need him?”

Ayer’s new film represents an about-face from his 2001 “Training Day,” in which the LAPD was depicted as infiltrated by corruption in the form of a sleazy character portrayed by Denzel Washington. Come to think of it, a darker side of the LAPD was likewise thematic in other movies, like the 1988 “Colors” starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall, or the 1990 “Internal Affairs” with Richard Gere. And the real life problems this police force has experienced in recent years have been dramatized by the media.

Considering the fact that the screenplay of “End of Watch” was authored by Ayer in six days, one can only speculate that he was determined to correct the record on a cinematically maligned law enforcement agency. In the film, all the nastiness is out on the streets, not in the hearts of cops who are pretty much angels in blue, whatever their manner of speech or rough and tumble ways.

Some of the scenes in the film take on the kind of violence reminiscent of movies of the “Cannibal Holocaust” genre of the 1980s. Officers Taylor and Zavala hardly have time to take a breath while maintaining a semblance of order in a universe gone crazy. They go in quick succession from saving infants in a house ablaze, intervening in a scene of domestic disturbance in which children are duct-taped in closets, discovering a colleague with a knife driven into his eye, or uncovering a room full of the victims of a Mexican cartel dedicated to drug and human trafficking.

Were this not enough, they both become targets of a local gang whose members are an unappetizing cloche of street people, and who go after them with assault rifles. This group, abetted by a character played by the actress Diamonique, are so overly fond of the F-word, for them it mouthily replaces most nouns and verbs of ordinary discourse. Their felonious patterns are taken to a feverish pitch that’s transparently beyond the pale. It’s a nauseating terrain of jacked up violence you just know wouldn’t be matched by any street reality an actual police force is likely to engage. It also has you wondering why the two patrolmen elect to be career enforcers faced with such a daunting outside world.   

Taylor and Zavala cling to each other as if the intimacy they share were their only haven against the external misery they are forced to contend with on a daily basis. Their semblance of normalcy on the outside is their relationship with the women they love.

You get the feeling that the characters played by Gyllenhaal and Peňa should stay in their patrol car. That’s where you’ll find some stunning acting in this film, not to mention a more digestible standard of realism.