End of Watch
DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY: David Ayer. STARRING: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, RUN TIME: 109 minutes
RELEASE: 2012
From the writer of Training Day, End of Watch is a riveting action thriller that puts audiences at the centre of the chase like never before. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star as young LA police officers who discover a secret that makes them the target of the country's most dangerous drug cartel.
'End of Watch' is a bit of a rarity for me. I've made no secret of the fact that I do not like Jake Gyllenhaal's films. It's not that I think he is a bad actor. Far from it. In fact, to suggest that would be criminal. Quite obviously he is a wonderful actor. It's just that I find his film's a bit bland, boring and morose. So, when 'End of Watch' was suggested to me quite a while back, I must admit, I was dubious. In fact, I consciously kept putting it off until this morning when I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go (where's my bravery award). Now, this film left me with mixed feelings to be honest. In a good way.
'End of Watch' is filmed documentary style, which isn't groundbreaking in the fact that it's nothing that I have not seen before but, it certainly adds quality to the tone of the film. I think if it was made using conventional camera work then it would not have been nearly as effective. It would have felt more like a standard buddy-cop film as opposed to the genuine intimacy that the chosen style gave it. Now, as with all films that use this technique or similar styles that we see in the 'found footage' genre, it is not without its flaws. Some times throughout 'End of Watch' it just doesn't work for me and on occasion I find it a bit irritating but, that's more because I struggle to fully appreciate this method as much as others might. However, as I said, this really is the only style that you could use that would make this film work successfully. So I'll have to put that aside as a pet-peeve and a bit of a contradictory statement.
“I am the police, and I’m here to arrest you. You’ve broken the law. I did not write the law. I may even disagree with the law but I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathies, nothing you do will stop me from placing you in a steel cage with gray bars. If you run away I will chase you. If you fight me I will fight back. If you shoot at me I will shoot back. By law I am unable to walk away. I am a consequence. I am the unpaid bill. I am fate with a badge and a gun. 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 are the same as me. They will lay down their lives for me, and I them. We stand watch together. The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.’”
Let me talk about what I consider to be some bad parts of this film and why it finally had me changing my mind overall and having the desire to watch it again. It starts off with a nice little chase scene with the viewpoint from within the patrol car as Gyllenhaal's character narrates a fairly cheesy bit of script-work of the top. This was all going pretty good until this scene came to a climax and ended up with some unnecessary fist-pumping. That's when I though 'Oh goody. It's going to be a bunch of cops blowing each other all the way through and doing congratulatory back-pats whilst telling each other how awesome they are'. It was losing me already. The film then plods along at a fairly flat pace as we follow Taylor and Zavala (Gyllenhaal and Pena, respectively) going about their tours with a lot of in-car conversations and crime scene attending. I found the whole gang warfare thing to be quite boring and every 'gang' character that I met throughout it all just irritated the hell out of me. Especially the women.
There was some truly clichéd and terrible acting from the co-stars and I thought the general script was pretty bad at times and there were some stupid moments that had me shaking my head on several occasions. I am also a man that swears, quite frequently as it happens but, the amount of swearing in this film drove me absolutely insane. I mean, it was seriously over-the-top and I'm not really sure what Ayer was going for when he wrote the script. Yes, I understand that people swear but a variation of 'fuck' 20 times in a sentence after every other word is just ridiculous. It had me cringing at its complete lack of necessity. I really didn't understand the purpose of it to be honest. Not to that extent. I haven't found swearing that annoying since the 600 times 'fracking' was used in the updated 'Battlestar Galactica' series.
One hour into 'End of Watch' and I was still trying to figure out where this film was headed, having not read anything about it or stumbled across any spoilers. I was constantly waiting for something awesome to kick in but, slowly losing heart that it never would. This is pretty much how it continued until I finally got to the finale (that I had been begging to happen since it started). Suddenly, everything changed. The climax of this film was brilliantly powerful and it made me reevaluate the entire film. I realized very quickly that in just wanting to get to the end of film that I thought was pretty pointless all the way though, that I had underestimated how good it really was.
What I had completely missed and took for granted was how great Gyllenhaal and Pena really were. The chemistry between them is absolutely fantastic, and they both play their roles with wonderful conviction. What they manage to do is make you for get that you are watching a film and really believe that these two are the closest of friends. Everything about their performances is so natural and you have no problem believing that these two are closer than brothers. This for is definitely Gyllenhaal's best performance to date (although I'm sure may would disagree with me) and Pena is on typically fine form. Predictably. This film isn't about gang-warfare and conflict. It's about the love, respect and unbreakable bond that two serving officers have for each other. This is a film that is full of heart and companionship and the fact that I missed this all the way through because I was too busy picking out all the negatives and criticizing it (possibly wanting to hate it) is a shocking underestimation as a film fan. This is a film that I will definitely be watching again with more of an open mind and better understanding of what it is all about. I cannot recommend 'End of Watch' enough to anyone out there. Gyllenhaal fan or not. If you have not seen this great film, get on it right away.