Intense, powerful, implausible

Rating: 7/10 (10 May 2002)

This film starts with an excellent premise and then sprints straight out into left field, makes a right turn at incredible and lands somewhere between absurd and ridiculous. Actually, I enjoyed the film, but this day of mayhem and corruption is so far from believable that it diminishes the film's value.
One of the most important factors in a good cop film is realism. It requires not just realistic guns, explosions and car chases, but realistic and authentic characters and a plausible story. In this film, almost all the characters are way over the top. Rookie director Antoine Fuqua brings great intensity to each frame from his music video experience, and most scenes have an imposing power that grabs the viewer and chokes off his air supply. However, Fuqua's failing in this film is that of excess. There are no moments of calm to create contrast. The film is all storm. It is well done, but exhausting.
Denzel Washington is a great actor. I say this without hesitation. However, this is nowhere near his best performance. He was far better in both `Hurricane' and `Malcom X'. He was robbed in 1993 when the best actor award went to Al Pacino for `Scent of a Woman' instead of going to him for his performance in `Malcolm X'. In `Training Day', Washington tries far too hard to be bad. He overacts in spots and he is so intent on being forceful that he neglects character nuances, normally his greatest strength as an actor. So, while I consider this to be a strong performance by any other standard, comparing Denzel to Denzel, this performance is just slightly above average. This year, Russell Crowe got robbed. However, Crowe won it last year despite the fact that both Ed Harris and Geoffrey Rush gave better performances. What goes around comes around, I suppose.
Ethan Hawke was also nominated for his supporting role as Jake, and it was a nomination that was well deserved. This is the strongest performance I can remember from Hawke. His is the most credible and nuanced performance in the film, despite being in Washington's shadow. He is helped, of course, by the fact that the character is the only one that is anything like a real person in the entire film.
This is a vigorous film that never lets up. The action and the psychological tension are first rate. It is just too overblown to be real. And to be great, cop stories need to be real. I rated it 7/10.