REVIEW: ‘Traing Day’ not for the faint-hearted
I think you can base how good a movie is by how often you think about it afterwards. This means the movie moved you in some way; it could mean it touched upon something close to you or it caused you to move into new territory you’ve never had to think about before. Or it could be it was so funny to you that you want to relive the happiness you found again.
The movies I think a lot about after I’ve seen them are generally gripping, realistic and often, uncomfortable to watch. A couple examples of this type of film-making are movies like Saving Private Ryan, Traffic, and Training Day – the new movie by director Antoine Fuqua (“The Replacement Killers”, “Bait”).
As the title infers, “Training Day” follows the movements of the characters in the film through a single day’s events, but it was so suspenseful and mentally involving to watch, I felt I had been watching it for 24 hours straight. I was tired.
Both roles of the main characters played by Denzel Washington (“Remember the Titans”, “The Hurricane”) and Ethan Hawke (“Hamlet”, “Snow Falling on Cedars”) are rich and completely believable.
Hawke, who plays a rookie cop in the film, is excellent at expressing the difficult situation a person finds themselves in when they are asked by a person they respect to compromise their ethics. There is a series of scenes where Hawke’s character is stoned which are perfectly acted.
Washington’s character is performed beautifully – a multi-layered, egocentric narcotics officer whose unconventional, slanted methods of law enforcement are in such striking contrast to that of Hawke’s boy-scoutish character they can best be summed up in one of Washington’s lines in the movie, “This [crap] is chess, not checkers.”
Probably the most disturbing picture this film paints is of a drug culture which dominates much of Southern California’s lower-class minority populations. As the film progressed and we follow the cops into houses where drugs are stored, purchased from,or used in, there were always guns and always children.
This film is not for the faint-hearted. It is not a feel good movie, but a movie which is totally, emotionally submerging and a movie which will not let it go for days after you see it. If you need a movie with a happy ending, I’d probably recommend “Serendipity”, although I haven’t seen it yet.
A-