The era where you could measure a movie's importance by the number of copies your local video store acquired upon its release belongs to history and it'll belong to oblivion before long. Choosing movies from a shelf on a limited budget is the reason why people my age have such glaring holes in their cinema culture. It took me 14 years to watch TRAINING DAY because of scarcity and uninspired sales pitch from people who saw it. It's a good movie: well-written, raw, savantly mixing action and tension. It's not a great, transcendent movie, but it's competent and multifaceted. I could afford the luxury of waiting 14 years to watch it because it has enough in the pants to beat father time for a couple decades.
Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is a young policeman completing his training to become a narcotics detective. His final evaluation will be made by decorated veteran detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) over a full day of work. Jake is a good, earnest kid with a powerful sense of morals, looking to gather whatever wisdom he can from his elders before being let loose in the concrete jungle. His day takes a weird turn though, after Alonzo puts a gun to his head and demands that he smokes marijuana, claiming it's a scenario he could face in the street. Turns out that Jake is the pawn in a game that's being played a couple floors above his pay check and that he chances of surviving his training day are getting slimmer and slimmer as the sun goes down. There is way more than the size of his future pay check in jeopardy.
TRAINING DAY has an undeniable old school charm. It's raw, unfiltered, like the majority of nineties movies. The footage is shot, pieced together and put out there. It's a honest, almost lost way of shooting movies that relies on location scouting and coherent camera work rather than post-production gimmicks. Los Angeles is a difficult city to give a screen identity to, you could shoot any movie out there and pretend you're anywhere else in the world and it would be easier than to establish a proper sense of place. Part of what makes TRAINING DAY successful is director Antoine Fuqua's patient, detailed rendering of life in the sprawling ghetto of L.A. It feels otherworldly, yet appropriate. It's bare, yet engaging and movies are simply not shot like that anymore.
Antoine Fuqua has this frame composition thing figured out.
The screenplay of TRAINING DAY is more indebted to the hardboiled fiction tradition than Hollywood's tired-ass mythic structure. It's a cynical and paranoid fantasy about the nature of man's law. I would go as fas as calling its plotting Ellroy-esque, based on that scene where old, evil white cops are plotting for political advancement around a dinner table. I don't think there's anything remotely realistic about it, but it's tremendously well-acted by two solid lead and the screenplay is understated enough not to make it obvious. See, TRAINING DAY is a mystery, but not a conventional one. It's masquerading as a gritty cop movie. There's no dead body at the beginning and no killer to bust. The viewer, like Ethan Hawke's character, has to gradually piece it together. There aren't that many hardboiled mysteries being shot today and definitely very few as engaging as TRAINING DAY.
Not every movie earn their reputation right out the gates. TRAINING DAY turned into a cult movie over years of perspective, mediocre Denzel movies and the erosion of action filmmaking. It didn't stand out at first, but since its release, countless films have capsized into cinema oblivion, yet TRAINING DAY is still talked about day as a seminal cop movie. It's not a transcendent emotional experience, but it's a gritty, hard nosed film that knows what it's good at and that will keep standing out in the future simply because movies of this genre are simply not filmed like that anymore. I have a weak spot for hardboiled fiction and mysteries that you might not share, so my first viewing of TRAINING DAY was special, but I don't see how anyone will dislike this movie. It's a competent, multifaceted, yet oddly simple movie that will continue its march through time for the foreseeable future.
Not every movie earn their reputation right out the gates. TRAINING DAY turned into a cult movie over years of perspective, mediocre Denzel movies and the erosion of action filmmaking. It didn't stand out at first, but since its release, countless films have capsized into cinema oblivion, yet TRAINING DAY is still talked about day as a seminal cop movie. It's not a transcendent emotional experience, but it's a gritty, hard nosed film that knows what it's good at and that will keep standing out in the future simply because movies of this genre are simply not filmed like that anymore. I have a weak spot for hardboiled fiction and mysteries that you might not share, so my first viewing of TRAINING DAY was special, but I don't see how anyone will dislike this movie. It's a competent, multifaceted, yet oddly simple movie that will continue its march through time for the foreseeable future.