End of Watch

David Ayer, writer of Training Day, has created a rare picture in End of Watch. This character-driven police thriller is shot with hand-held video cameras in a style that almost never works for me. Normally, films that are meant too look like they have been photographed by their characters don’t create the sense of realism and authenticity they strive for, but have the inverse effect of drawing attention away from the characters and placing it on the actors and the filmmakers. In this picture, however, the approach is quite successful. End of Watch starts out like a found-footage movie in that one of two cops the story follows is filming everything he does on the job for a film class. But Ayer quickly drops the found-footage pretense and begins to add more traditional camera angles, though still hand-held and stylistically equivalent, into the visual mix. By the end of the first act we are completely in the world of the two LAPD officers working their South Central beat.

As these cops, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are exceptional. We watch these young men go about their job, relate to their fellow officers and, most importantly, interact with each other in a way that captures the heightened relationship between police partners better than any buddy-cop movie I’ve seen. By the end of the film, we feel we know and understand these men so well that the rather standard events of the thriller carry far more weight than they would in a typical movie following the same narrative formula. The picture seems to have no agenda other than to create a credible representation of what these guys are like. The supporting cast of fellow cops, street-criminals and significant others is uniformly excellent and each actor is in perfect accord with the film’s hyper-real style--even though many of the roles are written as “movie characters.” It is not often that a film can pull off a balance of documentary-like authenticity and genre-movie entertainment, and this is where I’m most impressed with Ayer’s approach and accomplishment.