Training Day (2001) * * *

 

Directed by:  Antoine Fuqua

Starring:  Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Snoop Dogg, Eva Mendes, Scott Glenn, Harris Yulin, Tom Berenger, Dr. Dre, Cliff Curtis, Macy Gray

Denzel Washington leaps into his villainous role of LAPD detective Alonzo Harris with all of the zeal and glee he could muster.  He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Training Day, turning an amoral, unethical cop into someone hypnotically watchable and fascinating.  All of the events in the film take place over one day, with Alonzo acting as the mentor to rookie Jake Hoyt (Hawke-in an Oscar-nominated performance) and providing a crash course in the streets that lend itself to its own brand of justice. 

Jake wants to join narcotics because he wants to rid the city of drugs and dealers.  He will soon find that not only isn't this possible, the system is a perpetual vicious circle.  Alonzo has no qualms about raiding a dealer's house with a phony warrant and stealing the man's cash and supply.  Jake has many qualms, but tries to go along as far as his conscience will let him.  Training Day packs a lot of activity into the day, which soon stretches the limits of credulity.  We will witness Jake take a hit of marijuana, supposedly to follow Alonzo's demands to make him more authentic, but later a different agenda is revealed.  Jake saves a teenage girl from being raped in an alley, which has a payoff later.  Then, Alonzo and his crew raid the home of a former cop (Glenn) sitting on millions under the floor of his kitchen.  It turns out Alonzo killed a connected Russian mobster in Vegas the previous weekend and needs to quickly raise $1 million to prevent himself from being rubbed out.  

When Alonzo and Jake visit "the three wise men", powerful cops who are at the head of the table overseeing the department's corruption, we see the full scope of the state of the police and wonder why Jake would subject himself to that.  Training Day doesn't operate in reality, or I hope it doesn't, and is effective on its intended level.  Instead, Training Day works in the grey areas, the shadows, and the blurred lines between morality and practicality.  Alonzo tells Jake that the suppliers and dealers work outside the law, so the police sometimes have to do the same.  The world mostly operates in the gray areas, including when Alonzo kills the former cop and forces Jake to go along with the official story or be framed for the murder.  

The first ninety minutes of Training Day are a well-crafted, tense foray into daily police life.  The final twenty venture into more typical shootout territory where the villain can't be killed and the hero leaps from a roof on to the hood of a car without any injury.  Washington delivers his famed "King Kong has got nothing on me" speech, but we still ask why the people act the way they do towards Alonzo.  The final frame is puzzling, but the first two acts are over-the-top and continually entertaining, mostly because of the effective byplay between Washington and Hawke, who represent the ends of the spectrum in police morality.