End of Watch

Written and directed by David Ayer. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Brian Taylor), Michael Peña (Mike Zavala).

Bottom line: Pretty good action packed bromance but doesn’t really break the mold; handheld camera is cliché at this point and the episodic plot makes it feel more like a condensed HBO gritty cop series.

 2.5/4

End of Watch opens with the dashboard video of a police chase. South Central LA cop, Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal), explains that he is a cop. He is the enforcer of the law. He may not agree with it but he will enforce it. If you break the law, he will apprehend you. Rock music complements the Judge Dread type of vibe. The mood suddenly switches. With appropriately sympathetic music, Taylor says that behind the badge there exists a man who lives, loves and bleeds. He is not alone, there exist thousands of his “brothers and sisters” who stand with him and die for him. The music switches back to rock to continue the chase which ends in a shootout.

In this introduction, I found the placement of the characters interesting. Even though it is a violent gunfight, we only see the criminals. They are shooting at the police car and then die under a hail of bullets. Of course we know that the cops were returning fire but we don’t actually see them shooting. Only when the shots ends do the two cops enter the frame. In fact, we can’t even actually see their faces. It is a clever way of keeping the protagonists clean from death. The scene ends and the camera cuts to Taylor sitting in a locker room. He explains the inner workings of the police station and introduces his partner, Office Mike Zavala (Peña).

We learn that Taylor is studying Pre-Law and, in order to fulfill his Arts requirement, he elects to do film. This is why he carries a handheld camera and why he and his partner wear breast-pocket mounted cameras. For the sake of consistency, each of the other gangs (the Blacks and Hispanics) documents their escapades with handheld cameras. This premise is a license to have super shaky, super cliché “reality” camerawork. I would have really appreciated it if it would have gone full out: instead of having a bunch of shaky cameras, there were only the three cameras, one on each of the cops and one that they carry. Sure, it would have been just another Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project but I think it would have added something to this particular movie.

There is a really funny British comedy called The Trip starring, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. It was made into a movie in 2010. I got about halfway through the first season before I saw the movie and it turns out that the movie was actually the show compressed to an hour and a half. I don’t mean plot-wise, I mean the show was literally cut to fit the time. I mention this because I get similar vibes from End of Watch.  There is an overarching plot that revolves around a Mexican drug cartel but the movie is really episodic. The partners take on different cases (house fire, high speed chase, etc.) and they have personal endeavors (like the desire to have kids or marriage) with talking sequences in the police car interspersed. After watching The Trip, I wanted to go and see the rest of the series. After End of Watch, however, I didn’t have that desire (if it existed as a TV show).

The acting is ok. All the dialogue feels relatively natural and realistic. The plot is reasonable. Nothing mind blowing but it makes for a fine action movie. The pace is consistently swift. I wasn’t really on the edge of my seat but I wasn’t bored either. The action was fine too. One of my biggest problems with the movie is that the characters get rather melodramatic at times and I will talk about that in a bit. First, I want to talk about the bromance in the movie.

The go to situation of End of Watch is the police car with the partners driving around. They talk about work, play and women. You know, “guy stuff”. This is where the movie feels most comfortable. Now, I’d bet somebody who watched this pulls out the homoeroticism card but it won’t be me. I dislike the tendency to pull the homoerotic card when two grown men talk to each other. All love the guys show is clearly designated as fraternal.

I had some trouble relating to the characters. I wonder if that is because of the movie or me (I’d like to think that it’s the movie). Let’s say the two cops arrive at the scene of a double homicide where a couple kids were shooting at each other. The cops would probably have to leave the scene, gasping for air and answers asking “How could these kids do that? They are kids!” Why are we really seeing this and how does it move things along? Not ‘why are you showing such horrible things on the screen’ but more so ‘why are you showing the cop’s reaction’. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying kids killing kids is banal but, let’s be honest, it’s been done before. Is the dramatic reaction an effort to make the cops more sympathetic characters? Freaking out does not equal humanity just like stoicism does not equal a robot. Is it to inform the audience how to feel? I think we can understand how to feel without the prompt. It detracts from the movie to have to sit through all sorts of ‘this is a messed up situation’ monologues.

Overall, End of Watch is just another gritty police action drama. It isn’t bad but it isn’t great. I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to see it but, if it is on, there are worse things to see. It left me with thinking “meh” instead of “that was awesome, bro”.

Now, I found it interesting how the Police are paralleled in the Cartel. Mind yourself for spoilers. The concept of family or brotherhood is throughout the movie; one of the final lines of the movie is ‘he was my brother’. The police, as explained in the introduction, are a family with “thousands of brothers and sisters”. We can also see both how the Hispanic gang has a sense of family and that they are a massive organization (that is, they have thousands of gangsters on the streets). Much like the police partners, we follow a Hispanic crew: La La, a veteran gangster named Big Evil and a young budding gangster. When preparing for a drive by, Evil scolds the kid for hesitating in following an order. We learn that it is his first shooting so the hesitation was because of nerves. The mission goes successfully. Evil grabs the guy and they put their foreheads together. “You’re a man now,” he repeats.

This type of fraternity is mirrored in an earlier scene with Taylor and Zavala: the two are investigating a public disturbance case, an African American gangsta “calls out” Zavala whose response is to take off his badge and gear and fist fight. Upon winning the fight, Zavala and Taylor touch foreheads exactly the same way. Zavala broke so many rules simply on the grounds of respect or honor.

This isn’t to say that the movie is morally ambiguous (the Hispanic gang leader’s name is Big Evil, after all). Each group is categorized as good or bad less by what they do but how they do it (i.e. how they are shown doing it). I mentioned that the cops are not shown killing the criminals in the intro and type of setup holds throughout the movie. At one point, Taylor has the ability and justification to kill someone but he says, ‘he doesn’t want another death tonight’. But if there is a clear distinction between good and bad why do have common responses? Perhaps it is a common bond between men. When the gangsta was recalling his fight, he tells his friends that the officer was different from the rest because “he kept it gangster” For that, Zavala has earned gangsta’s respect. The movie could have played with this idea more but instead it just drops it back to the safe ground of a bromance action movie with debonair good guys.