TRAINING DAY
68
What if your first day as a narcotics police officer is a scary one, where your supervisor, also a police officer, forces you to push boundaries like doing illegal things on the street?Or if you, on duty, save a girl from being raped and hours later her uncle and his pals beat you up and almost shoot you to death?What would you say, if you survive?
Wait, better don't say anything. Better watch the movie directed by Anthony Fuqua in 2001, where those things don't happen to you but to a traffic control police officer, Jack Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), married with one daughter, who accepts a promotion to be trained one day as a narcotics officer with veteran officer Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington). If he passes the test, he becomes a narcotics officer. If not, he comes back to street traffic duties.
First, Jack is impressed with the very tough character of his mentor. But more impressed he becomes when Harris, married with four kids but also with another kid not recognised from an affair with a mistress (Eva Mendes), push the boundaries playing outside the rules. For example, using an informant who earns his daily bread by being a small-time marijuana seller to keep track of the "big fish". Or detaining people on the street who bought some stuff without filling in a report.
And it doesn't stop there. Alonzo has very strange methods to teach him, but he "accepts" those methods under the menace of being not approved and sent back to traffic duties.
A whole training day pass, on the way Jack saves a school girl from being raped, and he discovers in his mentor an awfully brutal and ruthless man arresting a drug lord to get his savings (and of course, this is not reported). He needs the money because in a row he didn't care of killing a russian maffia mob, and now he has until midnight to pay 1 million US dollars. Otherwise, he will be executed. Alonzo is not only a veteran cop with strange teaching ways. He is a rogue, manipulative cop who doesn' t care about anybody. Jack, after Alonzo tries to get rid of him, goes crazy and determined to ruin his plans.
Scenes to remember in this cop thriller packed with lots of action and the stunning performance of Denzel Washington, usually a good guy in his movies, playing a tough and bad guy (it won him his the Best Actor Oscar in 2001): when Alonzo stops the car in the middle of a junction and puts the finger on the trigger to make Jack try some stuff because "he needs to know what he is dealing with", the moment Jack saves the girl, the arrest of the drug lord supposed to be Alonzo's friend, the scene when the uncle of the saved girl and his mates beat Jack up and almost shoot him dead, the kick-and-fist final fight between Jack and Alonzo, and the end (sorry, I will not tell you, you are invited to see the film).
Written by David Ayer, produced by David Ayer and Davis Guggenheim, the action happens in Los Angeles. The casting includes Tom Berenger and two West Coast rappers like Dr. Dre, playing one of the Alonzo Harris team member, and Snoop Dogg as a small-time drug dealer. By the way, hip hop is the music included in the soundtrack. Whether you like it or not, is the best choice for an action police thriller where the main character is so ruthlessly tough.
Another amazing thing to remember and identify this movie is a sentence that Alonzo repeats again and again: "You wanna go home or you wanna go to jail?".
