Amazing performances, great action, good film, but it should have been better.

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2003)

There are a few actors in Hollywood that create a huge stir of interest and gossip anytime they come out with a new film. Tom Hanks is probably the biggest of these actors, but this group also includes tremendously talented actors like Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and of course, Denzel Washington. All of this almost automatic hype is not, however, entirely accurate at all times, and Training Day is a prime example of this. Now before you click on my name above so you can send me some hate mail, I should just point out that I am not pretending that Training Day is a bad movie, I am just saying that there are a lot of things in it that should have been done differently or not at all.
Denzel Washington plays the part of the scary Detective Alonzo Harris, and Ethan Hawke plays Officer Jake Hoyt, a new white officer on the force who is to learn the ways of being a tough cop from Harris. The most powerful part of the film is, of course, Denzel's performance as the hardened narcotics officer in Los Angeles, and the interaction that he has with the inexperienced Hoyt, who really only wants to get a nice promotion so he can provide a better life for his wife and kid. Harris has a way of doing his job that really makes it interesting, he's not just a guy running around arresting guys who sell drugs or are doing drugs, he plays his job almost like a chess game.
One of the more surprising examples of this is the way that he forces Hoyt to smoke PCP laced marijuana as one of his first lessons, explaining to the incredulous Hoyt that if he were to turn down a similar gift out on the streets, he's be dead. No further explanation is given, and none is needed. Harris knows that he has to be intimidating on the streets or he'll get killed, and he knows that he has to be as familiar as humanly possible with the very thing that he's trying to stop. These people are his people, but he's on the other side of the law.
There is an interesting way that the movie explores the possibility that many of that civil laws that police officers must follow only hinder the true delivery of justice and their efforts to stop crime, because Harris is an officer that pursues the bad guys in any way necessary, whether legally or not, and he looks much deeper into the situations than just getting the guys in cuffs in the back of his car. The scene where they see the two guys trying to rape a woman on the streets comes to mind. Hoyt is ready to throw these guys in the car, take them downtown, and throw them in jail, case closed. They witnessed the crime, it was that easy. Instead, Harris beats them both stupid and lets them go right in front of the astonished eyes of Hoyt, inspiring the famous line, `Let the animals weed themselves out.' God willing.
The real problem that I have with this movie is that, for one thing, it is entirely too violent in places where it doesn't need to be. One of the things that I hate to hear the most in a review of an action movie is that it's too violent, just because it sounds so much like something my grandmother would say, but take, for example, the scene where Harris and Hoyt are fighting each other hand to hand. This scene is excruciatingly violent, but the only problem that I have with it is that it should have been maybe a third of the length that it was. MAYBE. I am a serious fan of good bloody, violent movies, I even enjoy Steven Seagal films and Van Damme films, but even in the most hardcore action films and for the most die hard action fan, there comes a point where you think, `Okay, I GET it.' Training Day either does not believe that this point exists, or doesn't know where it is.
Besides that, I know that this is an aberrant role for Denzel Washington, who does not very often play villains, but even as the character that he played in Training Day, there are certain things that you simply can't do to an actor like him, and gunning him down Godfather-style by a whole row of machine guns is one of them. No matter how bad the guy is that he's portraying, you just can't do things like that to him, the man's LOVED! I am not usually one to complaing about issues of violence like this, but there is a place in the movies for excessive violence, and it is in Van Damme films and Seagal films, not in movies like this. Training Day had entirely too many real world connections to be dumbed down be excesses like that, and if these things had been reduced to a more realistic level at least slightly, the quality of the film would have increased enormously. Just a little change could have done a lot of good.