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Review: Training Day

Review by STARDINGO | 10/04/2001 | 14:37:49 PM PST

Denzel Washington treads in darker territory as an LAPD detective showing a rookie the ropes?and exactly how they?re meant to be crossed.

Today?s Topic: Ancient Quantum Mechanics?at Work in Movies Today!

Behold! The dazzling White Dwarf and the astonishing Neutron Star?tiny, incomprehensibly hyper-compact balls of blazing matter at the end of their epoch-spanning life cycle. So dense that, by all common logic, their own gravity should have caused them to implode eons ago?yet thanks to a wacky quantum physics phenomenon known as Fermi Pressure?a law that basically states stars can?t squeeze down any farther ?cuz there ain?t no room for ?em to squeeze down any farther?they still abide, fuel spent, having achieved a beautiful, silent, eternal interstellar Zen Nirvana of quantum equilibrium.

Ahhh, but here?s the thing: Disturb the White Dwarf, kick a couple electrons out of their happy quantum state places?and BAM!?the whole thing collapses in on itself in a destructive cosmic game of Jenga. Black Holes result; the universe gets a little more unstable. Eventually we?re talkin? Big Bang, Universe Explodin?, Get the Shotgun, Ma, Civilization?s a-Endin? kinda stuff; and suddenly things ain?t lookin? too good for the space-time continuum at large.

This phenomenon, usually observed in giant ancient interstellar masses, can also be observed on a smaller scale in the new movie Training Day. Here?s a film that for its first two thirds works hard to maintain an awesome balance between gritty, realistic cop drama, utterly believable character sketch, and mythic journey into the sick underside of Los Angeles. Then, right at right about the 1:15 mark, a Big Ol? Jarringly Unbelievable, Tone-Breaking Plot Twist involving a lost wallet comes along and violently upsets the delicate equilibrium; and Training Day collapses into a tired, uninspired black hole of rooftop gun chases and cops leaping valiantly onto the hoods of speeding cars. It?s always a shame to see a great thing so muddled in the final stretch?I can only recall the fiasco of Stevenley Kubrick-Spielberg?s A.I.. Here, the result isn?t as staggeringly awful?though there also isn?t any clear ?good stopping point,? either.

Sill, there?s lots to admire about this Training Day, from its intriguing structure to its seemingly endless laundry list of excellent performances. As the title suggests, the whole movie takes place over the course of one single (albeit very, very long) day; it begins as fledgling cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) opens his eyes to his the sight of his wife nursing his newborn son; it ends after sunset, as his first violent, life-altering shift in Detective Sergeant Alonzo Harris? (Denzel Washington) undercover LAPD narcotics unit comes to a close.

Rookie Jake?s ?training? comes in the form of a series of little trials, as he learns the way things ?really? work from Denzel, who robs crack dealers, shakes down harmless college dorks, and double-crosses his criminal friends, all in the name of justice. His philosophy is so whacked-out it circles around and makes sense again, and the movie treads on such morally ambiguous ground that Jake?along with the audience?doesn?t really know what to make of it. As the current TV commercials indicate, Denzel Washington?s performance is indeed ?electrifying,? though credit goes to Ethan Hawke, too, for playing off Washington so well. The script is already solid, but the two of them frequently make the dialogue flow so naturally it almost seems improvised.

There?s a scene about one-third of the way in, as Alonzo takes Jake to some of L.A.?s worst neighborhoods where his girlfriend and son live, where the movie begins to take on the power of a myth. As Jake makes his way down the street, he looks like some sort of modern Odysseus; and Alonzo is an ancient god who knows the ways of the world, and has them under his thumb; and this East L.A. street is an unfamiliar cavern full of Cyclops and sirens and all sorts of other bad things that Jake has heard of, but never seen, until now. The journey is handled so subtly and slickly that I was, quite frankly, in awe. Director Antoine Fuqua?s come a long way since The Replacement Killers.

The film, however, eventually collapses under the weight of its own complex goodness; blame it on a final act simply does not fit. Training Day ends as if screenwriter David Ayer simply didn?t know where to go next, or just got tired of typing, and decided to lamely cap everything off with silly plot twists, Dr. Evil-style monologues in which bad guys detail their world domination plans to heroes, lame chases, and goofily symbolic sequences that work against the rest of the film?s sure-footed reality. For over an hour, Training Day leads you on, and leaves you no reason to believe it won?t go down in history as a damn fine film. The fact that it turns out not to be might be the year?s most shocking twist ending.