Cop film is wild ride on mean streets
End of Watch ★★★ 1/2
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena Playing in English at Brossard, Cavendish, Colossus, Forum, Kirkland, Lacordaire, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech, Taschereau cinemas Parent’s guide: Violence, coarse language
The life of a policeman — at least a policeman in South Central Los Angeles, and at least as seen in End of Watch — is a series of dark images of the worst of human behaviour. The cops get there to find the woman whose face is being beaten to a pulp, or the man who sits on the sidewalk with a paring knife stuck in his eye, or two babies who have been tied and gagged with duct tape and put into a closet.
They don’t see how it happened, and they don’t see what happens later. They’re just around for an unhappy snapshot of what people do to each other.
It makes a man bitter, or, in some cases, ironic. “We were looking for all the food groups: guns, money and drugs,” says L.A. police officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal). “The ghetto will provide,” replies his partner, Mike Zavala (Michael Pena.)
End of Watch is a love story of sorts, between Brian and Mike, whose affectionately aggressive banter and chop-busting gives the film an air of easy (if obscene) camaraderie, and also between filmmaker David Ayer and his dark, explosive and likely mythic version of life in the ’hood. Ayer, who previously made the badcop drama Training Day, flips the coin this time to present the South Central police as everyday heroes.
“Once upon a time in South Central,” are the film’s opening words, and what follows has that tone of a bedtime story that’s meant to be cautionary rather than accurate.
It’s pretty well non-stop, and Ayer gives it a nocturnal propulsion with an on-the-run structure. The film is told through a sort of shaky found footage, some of which seems to come from other cameras that we don’t know about, along with the videos on the windshield of the police car.
What gives it life — as opposed to kinetic energy — are the performances of Gyllenhaal and Pena, who might as well be known as Bro and Dude. Their squad car conversations have the rambling tease of male relationships, which often sound like improvised standup routines that touch on such universal subjects as The Girlfriend, The Wife and The Job.
Zavala’s wife, Gabby (Natalie Martinez), and Taylor’s girlfriend, Janet (Anna Kendrick), are incorporated into the large police family that stands, in this telling, in opposition to the large crime families who kill and sneer on the other side of the thin blue line.
They emerge as beacons of friendship in a bleak world of barred windows, barking dogs and strutting gangsters. End of Watch is a scary, and sometimes funny, ride down the mean streets. It may be an exaggeration, but try to stop watching.