Strong safety, huh?

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2016)

Ethan Hawke has made a career out of perfecting the nervous smile and candid shake of the head. Even as he gets older he has retained that youthful naivety about him. In Lord of War I noted he was woefully miscast as the FBI hotshot - Hawke is not the arrogant, in control type. In Training Day he is a different brand of law enforcement, where his character plays to his strengths. In the beginning Jake Hoyt feigns confidence and ambition, but soon after is immediately wringing his hands and vibrating with a nervous energy because of the things he is being asked to do (he put this aura to great use as the fresh faced teenager in Before Sunrise). Hawke is like a modern Jack Lemmon, but dropped into a urban, unforgiving environment and a tireless role. His body is withered and lean, with a scratchy, unkempt beard as a symptom of long nights. He represents a rat, a narcotics cops scurrying over to the dark side.
Alonzo Harris is his opposite, who shares the same traits as Hoyt that might sooner mistake him for a dealer instead of a cop. Washington is relentless to the point of being overblown; with his skullcap, black 'matrix style' trenchcoat, silver crucifix necklace and penchant for double wielding pistols (with one aligned in the 'kill-shot' position), he treads the dangerous line between authenticity and the Hollywood vision of the edgy, corrupt cop. His dialogue is fast and furious, showcasing his 'street' knowledge and his wielding of racial capital to play both sides of the thin blue line closely, and often recklessly. In another world it would be easy to imagine him as a drug kingpin.
It is this approach that leads to Hoyt's first challenge. Harris underlines the offer with a bit of wisdom that makes so much sense that almost makes up for his methods: to be a narc you must know and love the drug. The second part of his nefarious plan is to lace the joint with PCP and create a trial of evidence that will later come into play. The 'drug vision', shot from the perspective of the dazed Hoyt, is where the film shows some of its false colours. It's ridiculous, highlighted with a nightmarish green tint, canted dutch angle and erratic shaky-cam straight out of some Don't Do Drugs PSA for a high school crowd. The nauseous combo with extreme close-ups barrelling in on the young rookie's reactions are part of Fuqua's treatment of 'realism', albeit a shiny, sanitised version of working narcotics. Occasionally, he even is allowed to splurge, and the result of this is a dramatic rooftop meeting of similarly corrupt cops about to raid an informant, or as they call it, 'cashing in an account'. We understand that each of the four have gone through the same trial by fire that Hoyt is being pushed through. But what's wrong with a Starbucks?
The ideal behind Hawke's Hoyt is a good one, if not simplistic. An early scene tacks a wife and child onto him like some sort of moral compass point, but not as part of a three dimensional character. He's an amalgamation of the characteristics that we and Hollywood like to see often in movies - white, middle class, young father, morally upright. Fuqua aligns the audience alongside him, and we nod and agree with his moral choices, before all that is upended and we discover that the streets operate on an entirely different level than the cinematic black and whites we are so used to. But the film also falls victim at the same crux. It posits that sometimes the bad guys win and that simple morality might not always be such an easy out, but then lets the angelic protagonist navigate the messy and heartless territory it has worked so hard to establish with relative ease and a few convenient narrative strokes.
Training Day recalls other tangled crime dramas about figures trying to navigate the corrupt waters of the system, in particular the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and its more well known western counterpart, The Departed. While the former wears its pulp on its sleeve by using a flashy action aesthetic and showy, soap-opera-esque flashbacks to push the narrative along, the latter was well and truly americanised. As with many of Scorsese's films it verges on the point of being overdone, stretched an extra fifty minutes and made gritty, grey and quietly devastating. A distinct difference lies in the treatment of the undercover gang member who infiltrates the police system: the original had a way of swinging allegiances and evoking Buddhist sentiments of a perpetual guilt, whilst Scorsese all but batters Matt Damon into the ground, leaving no room for dispute. Interestingly, Training Day was released but a month after the 9/11 attacks, with the American public distraught, and fear and paranoia running rampant. In that climate a cop could do no wrong. Nowadays I look around and see a very different environment, one where the lessons of Training Day might not be so shocking. While the two former films are more or less straight thrillers, Training Day attempts to say a little more, but it's not entirely successful either.