BOOM!

by Don Larsson

Ever since "crime on the streets" became a political campaign theme in the 1960s, social liberals and conservatives have slugged it out in films and TV shows over just what the police should "preserve and protect": a civil order that allows freedoms to be enjoyed or the civil rights that make civil order worth having. The issue has only intensified in the last month. And, in the end, that timing makes watching Training Day a much more unpleasant task than it might have been before September 11. There are important issues here that need to be examined, debated, and discussed, but by the end of the film those issues have been more or less discarded for a melodramatic conclusion in a story of personal revenge.

Though mentioned only indirectly, the LAPD Ramparts scandal is the backdrop to this piece. Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) wakes eager to begin his first day on an elite narcotics squad headed by the legendary Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington). His suit has been laundered by his loving, beautiful wife, breastfeeding their two-month old child. All that one could want to preserve and protect, the film suggests, is right here in this smallish, messy, but comfortable apartment.

Almost immediately, though, Jake finds himself thrown off-balance by Alonzo, an emotional judo master. Forget the suit, he's told on the phone, and meet Alonzo at his "office," a greasy spoon diner, for breakfast. Jake begins to realize that every one of Alonzo's words and actions is a kind of test - and Alonzo spends the day jerking the rookie around, all for his own good, he keeps advising him, emphasizing his points with a quiet "Boom!" (as in "Boom! We're outa there!") or a loud, maniacal "BOOM!" (as in "GOTCHA!").

But the new wariness about the LAPD since the Ramparts scandal makes Hoyt uneasy about Alonzo's methods even while it has made Alonzo even craftier. So far, the film is on familiar territory, the saga of a rookie cop being broken in by a streetwise elder who has his best intentions at heart. In this pattern, the older cop often bends the rules and sometimes even breaks them, but it's usually for the good of all. In the liberal slant on this pattern, the older cop goes too far and has to be reigned in by the younger one. In the conservative slant, the streetwise cop is betrayed by the system he serves and protects, but the younger one goes on, wiser if embittered.

Training Day, though, leaves only an artificial bitterness. The two go on patrol, watching the streets, running down small-time dealers, looking up snitches, stopping so Alonzo can grab a quickie at the apartment of his lover and son, and meeting the white power structure for lunch at a steakhouse. In fact, one of the film's strengths is the way that it emphasizes the importance of the car in LA, whether on city streets or the freeways or just as a convenient way to get quickly out of a neighborhood where you don't want to be. Ironically, that means that there is little time to develop a sense of what is actually happening on the street itself or who the people who live there are. That could be a way to examine how police remove themselves from the actual environments that they are supposed to preserve and protect , but it'is just a means for allowing the story to unfold within its arbitrarily unified one-day structure.

It is that conceit--making Training Day a one-day story--that undermines the film the most. It is not a real problem for the actors. Washington has received well-deserved attention for a role that runs through the movie like an exposed electric wire, his character giving off flashing arcs in each scene until the plot gets the better of him at the end. Violent, sarcastic, wise, honorable in one scene, thoroughly dishonorable in another, loud and angry with the streetlife, quiet and deferential with his superiors, Washington makes all of these inconsistencies remarkably consistent as a character whose real personality is just a collection of masks.

As a very naive younger man who at least has the strength and intelligence to be considered for a job like this (think of a more innocent version of Brad Pitt in Se7en), Hawke is also believable--in some ways a harder job than Washington's. As Alonzo's demands on Hoyt become harder and harder to take, you wonder if there will be a lesson in all this - perhaps about naiveté, perhaps about corruption. The performances are almost enough to make you overlook the plot devices. Almost. But not enough. Too much happens in one day. There are too many twists and turns that seem more and more contrived. including a coincidence that would make Charles Dickens blush. As a diversion at another time, Training Day might have enough going for it to keep you watching, but the average episode of NYPD Blue has more depth and ambiguity. And now, as arguments about how best to preserve and protect our society and its freedoms have taken on new urgency, Training Day seems like a movie from another era, long ago.

©2001 Don Larsson
CineScene