Just as the trend in Hollywood, after decades of
anti-Americanism and anti-military prejudice, may now be moving in
the opposite direction in movies like The
Hurt Locker, Act of
Valor, and the forthcoming Zero Dark
Thirty, about the killing of Osama bin Laden, so we may hope
that an even longer-lived if less-pronounced vogue for movies about
corrupt cops may be giving way to movies like David Ayer’s End
of Watch, which is such a throwback to old-time movies about
hero-cops that it will look positively corny to some.
Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love,
and yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have
thousands of brothers and sisters who would die for me and I for
them. We stand watch together. I am fate with a badge and a gun.
The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the
good from the bad. We are the police.
These are the voiceover words of one of the film’s two heroes —
in both senses of the term — Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal). As
his old-fashioned movieish spiel suggests, he would presumably be
impossibly straight-arrowish and therefore phony by today’s
standards, but for the fact that he is supposed to be making the
movie himself. Or at least a movie that is not entirely
separate and distinct from this movie. As a part-time law
student, he is said to be taking an elective in film-making and so
is recording his working life as a cop on film — or, rather, in
digital form — as a student project which, we are to suppose, has
been spliced together with the film we are watching.
It is, perhaps, a better idea in conception than it is in
execution, but it allows Mr. Ayer, who wrote the screenplay for the
corrupt-cop movies Training Day (2001) and Harsh
Times (2005) and who directed the latter, to put a certain
ironic distance between himself and the remarkably uncorrupt,
indeed heroic, cops we see in this latest movie. Brian Taylor is
also an ex-marine, which produces a bit of pro-military messaging
as well. But without his mini camera and filmic ambition, even
though both are mostly forgotten half-way through Mr. Ayer’s movie,
Brian would doubtless be too good to be believed. The bad guys —
members of a super-violent Mexican drug cartel led by someone
called (no irony here!) “Big Evil” which has unexpectedly hopped
the border to establish itself in L.A.’s gangland — might be
thought too bad to be believed, but for what I suppose is the great
publicity, from their point of view, that the brutality of real
Mexican drug cartels has been getting in the U.S. recently.
That this particular cartel has also displaced the black gangs
that used to run what used to be called South Central may be
thought also to immunize the film and its makers from charges of
racism or stereotyping, since the city’s black gangs, as
represented by the streetwise Mr. Tre (Cle Sloan), are also victims
and, after an initial flurry of bravado, meekly take their place as
allies of the police and members in good standing of the “prey”
whom the police are said by Brian to protect from such “predators”
as they themselves once were. Meanwhile, the predator-Mexicans are
also saved from the dreaded fate of racial stereotyping by the fact
that Brian Taylor’s partner, best friend and role model, Mike
Zavala (Michael Peña) is Chicano.
Mike or “Z” also comes from a large, jolly, and tight-knit
extended family — which might be thought by some to flirt with
stereotyping as well — and so provides the white boy with a
life-affirming model for domestic relations and philoprogenitive
ambitions when Brian gets serious about his new girlfriend, Janet
(Anna Kendrick), a former “badge-bunny” with a master’s degree in
fluid dynamics. Yet much is made of the LAPD as a kind of family as
well, where not only male-bonding goes on — the words “I love you,
man” actually occur in only semi-ironic form — but everyone looks
out for everyone else and the gals are as tough, and tough-talking,
as the guys. Heck, even the homicidal drug cartel isn’t so far
behind the times as to exclude a couple of lesbian killers, if not
killer-lesbians, from the gang that comes gunning for Brian and
Z.
It all seems rather a long way around to produce what, apart
from its super-hip and ironic style, amounts to little more than
your typical cop buddy-flick. That business about being ready to
die for one another is, as you will readily imagine, going to be
put to the test. And Brian and Michael’s solemnly swearing to look
after each other’s wives and families in case anything “happens”
may also suggest foreboding possibility. Still, there is little
time to think of such things in the course of the film’s numerous
action sequences as our guys battle not only the cartel but the
other every-day hazards — maybe a little too everyish — of a
street cop’s life in L.A., including a house fire to which the fire
department are late arrivals. Presumably Mr. Ayer is well aware of
the commercial imperative to give viewers what they expect and want
while also giving them his portrait of the real, unironic heroism
that they may not yet know they want. Again.
