philosoraptor42

End of Watch (2012)

Y'know what? Jake Gyllenhaal is great. Sure, he always seems to play a pretty similar role but it's not a simple role to play by any means. He generally seems to play a mostly well-meaning, but by no means perfect, typical guy.

Perhaps what distinguishes Gyllenhaal from other actors trying to pull of the same sorts of roles is that he seems to make typical subtle flaws seem effortless. In "Jarhead" for example, there's a scene where a fellow soldier's wife had spitefully sent him a homemade porn video where she cheats on him. The soldier, keen to see the video his wife has sent, discovers this betrayal with all his fellow soldier's around him also watching. The soldier walks out furious and everyone is asked to leave, but Jake Gyllenhaal's character insists that he wants to stay and watch the video.

This isn't because Gyllenhaal's character is going to gain pleasure from watching it, but because he wants to watch someone else be destroyed in order to feel better about his own situation. It's pure spite and selfishness, but we don't feel shocked by this turn in his character and we don't feel especially less of him for it either. We recognise that Gyllenhaal's characters are typical human beings who are free to make good or bad choices at any moment. There's nothing clean-cut or saintly about them; they're just people.

Even in Gyllenhaal's earliest film "Donnie Darko" he played a character who would be rude and defiant, sometimes because he was just acting his age, sometimes because he was rebelling against authority and sometimes because of a strong moral sense - And sometimes because of all three. And when we see him trying to attack a vision of a creepy rabbit in the mirror with a knife, it's not clear how we should feel about it. There's a deep moral ambiguity to Donnie Darko in general and Jake Gyllenhaal, in hindsight, was the perfect choice for the role.

"End Of Watch" is a not-quite-found-footage movie about two police officers who have a strong friendship. As we begin the movie, everything we see is filmed by someone. It turns out that the bad guys also have cameras and film each other too. I've heard it asked who would be editing the film together afterwards and while it's plausible that the camera belonging to the bad guys could have been seized and the film edited together afterwards, I think you need to give the film some level of poetic license. As it turns out, there are some shots which are clearly additional to those being filmed by the found-footage cameras we know about and so accepting some poetic license is absolutely essential here.

Most of the film is Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña involved in friendly banter with one another. These scenes are fantastically written because while the two characters ramble on, not only is the way they tease one another very funny, but it's also very revealing about the two characters. The movie could almost work with nothing but scenes where the two officers never leave their police car.

The plot here is pretty simple. While there are suggestions that things might get more complicated in places, in the end this is an only moderately nuanced case of a police versus gang story. What makes the piece work is the thorough depiction of the way the police interact and the characters involved.

The film begins with a piece of narration with Jake Gyllenhaal overselling the role of the police. He describes himself as part of the thin blue line protecting the weak against the forces of evil and the police force itself as a family devoted to one another.

What follows is a somewhat more realistic vision of the force from essentially a fly on the wall perspective. We see police officers jovially chatting in a very informal way, but we also see that one police officer is very bitter about his position in the force. We see the way the officers back one up, but we also see officers play pranks on one another.

One particularly bold move, I felt, was how harsh the female officers were towards a new female recruit who they didn't feel had what it takes. There's a stark distinction between Uhura in the recent Star Trek movie who constantly gasps in shock and the female police officers here who have clearly been hardened by their experiences and have a no-nonsense "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" approach to their role, every bit as tough as the male officers.

I must admit, I'm still not convinced by Anna Kendrick. She is absolutely fine here. But I'm finding that "absolutely fine" is how she always comes across and it's looking more and more doubtful that I'll ever see a performance of hers that will blow me away.

"End Of Watch" is a great movie. It's a simple story told extremely well. In the end I think the story was a little too simple for me to mark it as one of the best, but what it does, it does extremely effectively and I'm certainly going to be highly interested to see what writer/director David Ayer puts his hand to next.

(BTW anyone seen "Harsh Times" or "Street Kings"? Those are the other two movies David Ayer directed. "Harsh Times" even stars Christian Bale!)

B+