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 raining Day gives me flashbacks of my first week in
L.A. When I moved there, I had visions of the big Hollywood sign, movie stars,
and film crews shooting movies down the street. Those are the common images
people conjure up when they think about moving to L.A. Unfortunately, I had
little money and the part of town I ended up in was as far from the big
Hollywood sign as you could get. When I was watching David Ayer's Training
Day, I thought about that first week in L.A. Ah, the memories. I could
almost hear the daily car chases, the nightly helicopter flybys and spotlight
searches washing over my bedroom window and the smell the gun smoke all over
again.
Training Day is a kick in the teeth. It's a gritty,
raw, and extremely intense film. I could practically see white audiences
squirming in their seats the way Ethan Hawke's Jake character was squiring when
Denzel Washington's character, Alonzo, introduced him to the real streets.
I
could practically smell the fear in white audiences around the country as they
witnessed what Jake was witnessing; as they went through his paces with him. To
be sure, Jake is an easy character to empathize with. Jake is a decent human
being and he's also a good cop, but most of all, Jake is a white man dealing in
neighborhoods that are almost exclusively black or Latino. He is, in a sentence,
out of his native element. Alonzo, on the other hand, has ceased to become a
human being a long time ago, but Alonzo is the only one who is not aware of that
fact. Everyone knows it, from Jake to the hoods that Alonzo intimidates on a
daily basis with the power of his shield.
The film begins as a day in the life of a narcotics cop, as
seen through the eyes of Jake, who is doing a sort of audition to join Alonzo's
squad. Jake is ambitious, and the surest way to a Detective's shield and a comfy
career in the L.A.P.D. is through Alonzo's crew. But that means Jake has to
impress Alonzo enough to be invited back after that first training day.
The
movie quickly turns into something else after the first hour mark, and we
realize all those "training exercises" orchestrated by Alonzo actually
has another, more sinister reason behind them. You see, Alonzo is a hothead, and
during a certain visit to Vegas, Alonzo did something he wasn't supposed to do.
Now he has to get $1 million together fast or pay the consequences. Unfortunately for Jake, his training day coincides exactly with the same day
that Alonzo is being squeezed.
Training Day is a brutal film. It's shot in stark
colors with splashes of brightness reminiscent of director Antoine Fuqua's first
feature, The Replacement Killers with Chow Yun Fat. There is that
ever-present air of uncertainty that surrounds Training Day, the kind of
feeling that tells you something isn't right, that something might happen at any
moment. Or, as Alonzo likes to say, "Boom!"
A scene towards the end
when Jake and Alonzo visits a house filled with Latino gangbangers is a
guaranteed nail biter. You can practically feel the tension oozing out of every
second of that sequence. It is that nicely filmed, acted, and written. Ethan
Hawke's portrayal of Jake culminates in the kitchen scene, when he, and we,
realize something is about to happen, and it's not going to be good.
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