Training Day (2001)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
On his first day on the job as a narcotics officer, a rookie cop works with a rogue detective who isn't what he appears.
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16 films that influenced Training Day
What critics say influenced Training Day
The mean streets of this L.A. evoke a paranoid agoraphobic's point-of-view, not unlike the San Francisco of Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers--the California sun is a startling counterpoint to the Stygian darkness at the heart of Alonzo's smearing of the thin blue line.
That respect for our intelligence alone makes it the best cop movie since "Cop Land" and renders it worthy of being spoken of in the same sentence as "The French Connection" or "Prince of the City."
Like all great movie monsters, from Kong to Godzilla to Edward G. Robinson in "Little Caesar" and Al Pacino in "Scarface," Harris is bigger than life, a morally ambiguous titan, a source of both wisdom and terror.
Likewise, gangster Jimmy Cagney upstaged Pat O’Brien’s streetwise priest in Angels with Dirty Faces , but there at least some attempt was made to redeem Cagney’s character.
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To defuse charges of racism, the movie carefully includes its share of corrupt white officers, lurking in shadows in a restaurant and casually talking about executing a criminal who hoodwinked the court system (the scene could've been lifted whole and breathing from The Star Chamber, in which a group of frustrated judges banded together for vengeance).
A brutal, fierce, and tense police thriller, "Training Day" takes a well-worn format and infuses it with freshness and verve, transcending its derivative elements to form a more than worthy companion to the likes of "The French Connection" and "Internal Affairs".
Washington, in this evil-genius hustler mode, is an expert at throwing out words like happy punches, and for a while, as ''Training Day'' proceeds in its seemingly random, two-cops-in-a-car way, we wonder: Is Alonzo meant to be a South Central heir to ''The French Connection'''s Popeye Doyle, or is he a stone-cold sociopath?
If director Antoine Fuqua and David Ayer would have been smart enough to leave all that alone, they would have made the best amoral police drama since The French Connection.
To its credit, then, Training Day digs a little deeper and shows, every bit as well as such genre milestones as The French Connection and A Touch of Evil , how intertwined the worlds of crime and police work are.
When Alonzo pulled a gun on Jake, forcing him take a few hits off a bong as traffic flowed past, I wondered if the film was going to be an even darker version of Lili Fini Zanuck's Rush.
Compare Training Day to Michael Tolkin and Bill Duke's underrated Deep Cover and the extent to which the ostensibly "daring" Training Day caves to convention is thrown into sharp, disappointing relief.
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Thrown in with a handful of these goons, Ethan Hawke is like a coed virgin at a frat bash, and the movie turns ugly in its sadism, like a perverse cross between ''Midnight Express'' and ''Falling Down.''
A brutal, fierce, and tense police thriller, "Training Day" takes a well-worn format and infuses it with freshness and verve, transcending its derivative elements to form a more than worthy companion to the likes of "The French Connection" and "Internal Affairs".