Harsh Times (2005)
Directed by David Ayer
Jim Davis is an ex-Army Ranger who finds himself slipping back into his old life of petty crime after a job offer from the LAPD evaporates. His best friend is pressured by his girlfriend Sylvia to find a job, but Jim is more interested in hanging out and making cash from small heists, while trying to get a law enforcement job so he can marry his Mexican girlfriend.
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What critics compared Harsh Times to
A Navy man himself, writer-director David Ayer smartly moves away from the feverish cop and urban crime dramas he's written and sometimes directed (Training Day, S.W.A.T., Dark Blue, Harsh Times, Street Kings, End of Watch) to channel his dramatic ferocity into a story of the Allies' final ground assault on the Third Reich.
Writer-director David Ayer ("End of Watch," "Harsh Times," he wrote "Training Day") loves to get down to the ugly nitty-gritty in films, and here he absolutely rolls in the dirt.
That's everything you need to know to appreciate the obsessions Ayer eventually channeled into films such as Harsh Times, Street Kings, Training Day and End of Watch.
Writer-director Ayer specializes in tough, unsentimental movies about societies of violent men trying to live by unwritten codes of ethics, a theme that reappears in his scripts for U-571, Training Day, The Fast And The Furious, Dark Blue, Harsh Times, and End Of Watch.
It also shows that writer/director David Ayer ("End of Watch," "Harsh Times") can do better than good.
Since then he has written “The Fast and the Furious,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Dark Blue” and after making his directorial debut with his screenplay “Harsh Times” directed a second film in 2012, “End of Watch,” a realistic and memorable account of policing in L.A.’s dicier areas.
There are shades of Panic Room in Don’t Breathe as well as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the disgusting use of a turkey baster will make Christian Bale’s awkward handling of the cooking utensil in David Ayer’s Harsh Times seem tame.
But the film recovers, in part because Ayer, a director whose previous work has mostly been cop dramas and war movies (he wrote Training Day and directed End of Watch, Harsh Times, and Fury), makes this comic-book stuff play to his strengths.
Whereas Ayer blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad guys in such hard-R thrillers as “Training Day” and “Harsh Times,” and brought immersive street cred to the relatively tired cop genre with “End of Watch,” he’s saddled with a family-friendly PG-13 rating (his first) and entirely too many characters to let his gritty sensibility loose here.
“Suicide Squad” was written and directed by David Ayer, who previously made several movies about complicated, flawed people (he wrote the screenplay for “Training Day” and directed “Harsh Times,” “Street Kings” and “End of Watch”).
Memo to Ayer: Directing Harsh Times in 2005 and claiming you’re the rare Midwestern boy who’s down with South Central L.A. does not mean you can pull off this Lotería card cliché who lunges into war bellowing, “Ora si, Cabron!” especially when he’s the only Latino with a speaking part, besides his one scene with his lady.
Ayer’s best work as a writer – Harsh Times , Training Day , End of Watch – kept the audience on side with characters whose moral ambivalence frequently tipped over into gleeful corruption and self-destruction.
Suicide Squad reflects the crime-ridden ghetto aesthetic of Ayer’s Harsh Times , Street Kings , and End of Watch , but lacks their storytelling discipline, and it’s not in the same league as his confident 2014 war film Fury .