Gyllenhaal cop thriller worth a watch

by Willie Krischke

“End of Watch” is like an extended episode of “Cops,” albeit the absolute best one ever. That’s the advantage of fiction, I guess; you get to take characters into a greater number of dramatic and exciting situations than in reality. Your cops have an adventure every day, saving children from burning buildings, chasing gangsters through the ghetto and fist-fighting big, nasty drug dealers. It’s all part of the job, especially if the job is writing scripts. Plus, you get to decide who lives and dies. It’s almost like being a superhero.

This movie has a plot, strictly speaking, but it’s only half-hearted. That’s a good thing, because it’s pretty lousy. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star as LAPD partners who are dedicated to their job. The first half of the film is littered with scenes of heroic, even idiotic, bravery, which culminates with medals of valor for saving three kids from a burning house. But then our heroes stumble upon a drug cartel. When the FBI shows up and warns them to stay away, surprisingly, they do so. There are plenty of kittens to save and old ladies to check in on. But then they happen upon another hideout for the same cartel, and now there’s a price on their heads, which they ignore (“We’re cops ... everyone wants to kill us”) until a run-in with the cartoonish bad guys.

Yeah, it’s that bad. Except nobody seems to care. There’s really no pacing in “End of Watch;” no sense of conflict and tension building to climax and resolution. The thing just ambles along, abruptly alternating between action and comedy. But instead of feeling like a trainwreck, it feels true to life; a cop’s life is hours of inane conversation punctuated suddenly by moments of adrenaline. Real life is rarely paced the way we’d like it to be.

And it helps that “End of Watch” manages both action and dialogue well. The action is well-executed, thanks to the director’s solid sense of setting as well as his knowledge of when to keep us in the dark and when to turn on the lights. But the best parts are in between the action: Gyllenhaal and Peña in the patrol car, trying to stay awake; conversations in which razzing turns quickly into dead serious and then back to razzing with a rhythm that is warm and engaging.  

The film starts out as yet another “found footage” type of thing. Gyllenhaal carries a camera for a class he’s taking in night school, and people – most of them angry cops – keep telling him to turn it off. (He’s supposedly pre-law, but after one line about “taking classes” in the first 10 minutes, it’s never mentioned again.) Quickly, the film drifts away from that pretense. Director David Ayers can’t find excuses for the shots he wants to include, and eventually seems to just give up trying. (The worst moment comes when a group of foul-mouthed gangsters steal a van for a drive-by shooting – and one brings along a video camera. Seriously?) But it’s just as well; the “found footage” gimmick has been done to death, and Ayers is a better director when he just owns up that he wants to use lots of shaky, disorienting shots to tell his story.  

“End of Watch” straddles the line between buddy-cop comedies like “The Other Guys” or “Rush Hour” and intense, overly serious films like “Training Day” or “Righteous Kill.” There are lots of funny moments, and it also has its share of harrowing, even sickening scenes. But the characters refuse to take anything seriously unless it really is, well, serious. I guess after you’ve seen children tied up and stuffed in the closet by their crackhead parents,  it’s hard to get worked up when your supervisor yells at you about paperwork. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see good, competent and dedicated cops who aren’t all serious on their mission to save the world from the forces of evil.  

So what we have, ultimately, is a curiously watchable film that is probably better on the screen than it was on the page. If this was really supposed to be a traditional cop film, i.e., a “found footage” action-thriller about two cops who cross the cartel in South L.A., it could easily have been one of the worst films of the year. It’s impossible to say who or what saved “End of Watch” from itself.

Ayers wrote the script and directed, and so is bound to say everything is exactly how he intended it. But given that there are so many abandoned ideas, and that the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Peña is really the heart and soul of the movie, one has to wonder if perhaps this is the rare case of actors saving a film from its director. Of course, the director has to be pliable enough to allow that to happen, so let’s be thankful he was. “End of Watch” ends up being solidly entertaining in some odd and even memorable ways. It’s worth watching.