Denzel Washington has needed a change of pace for a long time now. While certainly a highly gifted actor, he's been stuck in a bit of a rut. He's played a very long list of clean cut hero roles and while he does a great job with all of them, it's gotten a bit old. He needed to shake things up and try something different. With Training Day, he does just that and with startling results.
 In this film, Washington play Alonzo Harris an undercover narcotics cop in charge of a small unit working in Los Angeles. He is spending the day showing the ropes to a young new candidate for his team. Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) has just one day to prove that he belongs in this highly decorated unit. He's exactly what the police want to turn out, a clean cut cop with strong morals and a real desire to do good. Alonzo on the other hand is a cop who started out like that but long ago bent the rules to improve his results. Then he bent them again and again and now the rules are something like Sasquatch to him, a myth.
Director Antoine Fuqua has always shown great style and skill in the look of his films but this time he has a story and characters to give the movie a soul to match the looks. He does a great job of shooting the city in a realistic style. It isn't always pretty and it is filled with countless predators.
The interaction between Washington and Hawke is the driving force of the film. Alonzo is absolutely ruthless and nearly that corrupt. Certainly he's put away a lot of criminals but in the process he's slid so far over the line that its nearly impossible to tell him apart from the criminals. Washington turns in a performance that is startling for both its energy and the departure from previous roles. He is both wildly entertaining in this role and frightening. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination and deservedly so. This is a role that flies in the face of anything he's done in the past and he is as good in it as any other role. He plays someone who believes more in street justice than justice from a court. He's been crooked so long he's started to believe his own hype. Alonzo would rather beat someone to near death than send them to jail. A real fun guy.
On the flip side of the coin is Hoyt. Ethan Hawke makes him a competent but naive cop, looking to become a detective. There is a really noticeable destruction of innocence in his character during the movie. The tension comes from watching his morals try and hold in the face of an all out assault by Alonzo.
Is this movie completely believable? No. There are moments that stretch credibility to the breaking point and beyond. There are moments where things seem a bit murky and we're not really sure what we're looking at. Alonzo himself is such an extreme character that he can be hard to take seriously occasionally. But that doesn't matter in any great way because the film is smart enough and engaging enough to make it tough to care about little problems.
When watching the film, questions would pop into my head and then Washington would give us a little more of Alonzo and I'd just stop caring. It's a dark film but an intensely entertaining one. What else do you need?
- John Shea
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