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Review: Training Day
It's great to see Denzel Washington playing a bad guy, and especially impressive to see him as messes with the mind of his eager young partner Jake. Washington is dazzling -- alternately charming, surprising, angry, powerful and savvy. He laughs, cajoles, taunts, tempts and psyches out his younger prey. He's electric, keeping the audience continuously off guard. Jake Hoyt is along for his first day's training to work as an undercover cop, a job he hopes will lead to promotions and more money for his wife and new baby. Set against the backdrop of the ugly and real-life corruption scandals still wracking the Los Angeles Police Department (already battered by years of racial tensions and accusations of brutality), he and Alonzo set out in a souped-up Monte Carlo to ride the mean streets of LA.
Hawke is also great as the eager but savvy rookie who is shocked, then horrified, as he realizes just how out-of-control, brutal and corrupt his new partner is, and how insistent Alonzo is on drawing him into the quagmire of corruption and brutality that underlie the older cop's world. Even though Hoyt knows better from the first, Alonzo is so powerful he can't quite walk away. The movie would have been so much better off if they'd just left the main story line at that, but that no longer seems possible in the looney-tunes world of big-profit studio marketing ambitions.
Training Day quickly degenerates. The "ghetto" scenes are garish, crude, nearly racist stereotypes of life in the big city. Every black or Hispanic kid under 40 is packing and shooting. The elaborate white-men police corruption conspiracies driving the plot were done much better in Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Hoyt's answer to his increasingly nightmarish predicament is as unsatisfying as it is puzzling and unclear. And a silly plot twist featuring a Russian mafia with enough firepower to take ot the Taliban is inane. I'd highly recommend seeing this movie to anyone who wants to see a great actor strut his stuff for a good hour. Mid-way through, though, you might want to do yourself a favor, finish your popcorn and just go home.
In that vein, here's Ebert's review. I'm sorry to say that I trust Ebert's opinions more than Katz's, as they more often reflect my own. He (Ebert) gave it his fairly common three-star rating, so I think it's probably worth watching as a rental.
Training Day
Here is a link to Amazon's review of the movie. Here is a link to Yahoo's review of the movie. [User Rating: (4.1/5) ]
Chicago Tribune said this about Training Day.
"Training Day," for most of its length, is genuinely thrilling, explosively cynical about life on the streets and in the squad cars. More strikingly, it lets Washington play a really juicy heavy: hard driving, acid-tongued Detective Sgt. Alonzo Harris. Harris is Washington's meanest, most brutal and dangerous character in years -- an L.A. cop who's adjusted so completely to life among the wolves that he's become a wolf himself. Washington is magnificently vicious and wily in the role."
"Dares to be a cop movie based on character and not on pyrotechnics."
-- Jeffrey M. Anderson, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
"The film works a bit better as a vehicle for Washington, and it often gets by on his devilish charm. But it loses all its punch as he becomes more hissable."
-- William Arnold, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
"A taut -- if violent -- police thriller."
-- Ken Fox, TV GUIDE'S MOVIE GUIDE
"Washington's performance is so good, in fact, that it may temporarily blind you from seeing that the movie has obscured its message."
-- Sean Means, SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
All Posters.com as a poster of the show if you are looking for one.
Here is the director Antoine Fuqua's filmography. I was interested to see if he was an action director that is continuing his specialization or if he directed mainly heart felt drama's and was crossing genre's. With a limited filmography that includes previous B+ rated action flicks as The Replacement Killers, it seems that he has the background to provide us with an entertaining medium grade action flick. I would definately see this movie over The Musketeer.
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Denzel Washington (Det. Alonzo Harris) is amazing as a rogue LAPD narc who's turning his new rookie partner Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke)...
Parallel construction please. To someone who's not aware that Ethan Hawke is an actor, he'd think that Ethan Hawke was the character's name.
Shoulda been:
For that matter, character names in reviews are usually just noise and show that the reviewer lives inside his press kit. A cleaner intro would have been: