Hard Boiled and extremely well acted cop drama

Rating: 9/10 (5 October 2001)

Antoine Fuqua's Training Day is a film that gets a big boost in the acting department from Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke, but it's script is also acute and sharp as a knife when it comes to showing corrupt cops in Los Angeles.
Hawke plays Jake Loit, a rookie cop with 19 months training who's gonna get some real training (narc training) on a day in L.A. from a unconventional detective (Washington). You know a cop movie will be quite different when in the first 30 minutes a cop is smoking dope (laced with PCP), though it isn't quite simple how it got to that anyway. As is much of the movie, which never takes the easy way out of scenes (outside of a unreal ending) and stays in it's region quite well. Sometimes it seems like we've seen this before, but Washington is so convincing as a villain type, which he usually avoids, that the film is overall quite entertaining and worthwhile. Hawke is also noteworthy as the rookie whose life and perspective of what he once thought of (the LAPD) will change. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Macy Gray co-star. A-