David Ayer is anything but a neophyte when it comes to telling stories about the LAPD. He’s directed crime movies set in L.A. like Harsh Times and Street Kings, he was a writer on Training Day, and generally he just has a laundry list of credentials concerning stories that focus on Los Angeles police, crime in South Central, or both. You might say that everything he’s done has led up to his making End of Watch, an in depth look at the lives of two LAPD beat cops, what they go through on a daily basis, and what drives them to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
Said cops are Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), an adrenaline junkie who may be too smart and too reckless to be a great candidate for the job that he loves, and Officer Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), an easy going family man who probably follows Taylor into danger more often than he should. They’re cops, they’re partners, they’re best friends, and we follow them around for what feels like a number of months as they protect the streets and videotape everything they experience.
Yeah, End of Watch is one of those found footage movies that tries to pretend like it’s real life events that were cobbled together by various security cams and handheld cameras to piece together a faux documentary narrative. What this accomplishes is giving the film an immediate, kinetic, exciting aesthetic. The opening sequence is a first person perspective shot of a police cruiser engaged in a car chase that feels like it’s footage from a video game. It’s fast, it’s exciting, and it sets the tone for everything that comes next. End of Watch isn’t realist, it’s a loud, muscular action film that better encapsulates gamer culture than any movie actually based on a video game I’ve ever seen.
These cops attack their jobs like you’d attack a fighting game or a first person shooter. They relish confrontation, they throw themselves into danger, and they do what they can to game their calls in order to “win” at being police. There’s a disconnect between the way they see the daily dangers they experience and the way they really are—a wall of cowboy machismo and pumping adrenaline that separates them from reality. And, similarly, the way the film inundates us with over the top action and over the top dramatics makes us feel like we’re watching a big dumb action movie, which keeps us from worrying too much about the consequences of what the danger these guys are throwing themselves into might be. I mean, nothing bad could happen to an invincible movie hero, right? Ayer lulls you into a sense of comfort, and then he turns everything on its head, gets you in a state of panic, and really tightens the screws.
Those are the reasons why the film’s visual style works. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of reasons why it doesn’t. The shoddy attempt at making all this footage look like it’s come from security cams and camcorders is ill-conceived and unsatisfying in its execution. The reason we’re given that Gyllenhaal’s character is carrying around a camera all the time is that he’s doing a project for school, but seeing as he never even attends a class at any point during the movie, it all comes off like a half-baked excuse. And considering that there are multiple camera angles, in every single scene, that couldn’t possibly have been shot by a camera that one of the characters is carrying, the whole attempt at making everything look like captured happenstance just feels so pointless.
You know you haven’t pulled off the gimmick when you have to keep having all your characters repeatedly ask why there are cameras around, and that must happen a dozen times here. Nothing that Ayer accomplishes by having Gyllenhaal and Peña attaching mini-cams to their lapels couldn’t have been just as easily accomplished by using some down and dirty handheld camera work and ditching the shoddy gimmick where you have to ask us to believe that gang bangers would be taking home movies of their drive-bys. Essentially, the found footage gimmick ends up making End of Watch way clunkier in execution than it ever needed to be.
Maybe the reason Ayer found it necessary to frame everything as being found footage is because his script doesn’t really tell all that much of a story. We follow around the protagonists while they’re on duty, we follow them through a gauntlet of dangerous situations, but we’re never given any clear indication of where it’s all headed, or even what the point of what we’re watching is. Usually that would be a problem. But here it mostly works, not only because there’s the vague threat of the Mexican drug cartels’ growing power always getting hinted at in the background and connecting otherwise disparate cases, but also because the film ends up being a character study much more than it is a crime film (despite being packed full of intense though slightly manipulative crime scenarios). The point here isn’t to solve a mystery or make a statement about street crime in Los Angeles, it’s to spend time with and grow to love Officers Taylor and Zavala.
And, because Gyllenhaal and Peña are just so damned good in their roles, that actually ends up being enough. End of Watch is at its absolute best when these two guys are just sitting around and shooting the shit. They’re so natural in these roles, they have such an easy chemistry, that it’s actually kind of hard to believe they haven’t really been spending the last few years patrolling the streets together as partners. Every aspect of how these two men relate to each other—about how their very different personalities interact—feels like it’s been meticulously plotted down to the detail, and that has to mostly be thanks to what a symbiotic acting collective Gyllenhaal and Peña become when they’re together.
Their success in the roles shouldn’t come as any shock at this point, however. Gyllenhaal started his career as a strong actor and has only grown more skilled and more versatile as he’s gone on. And Peña, well he’s the sort of performer who has such a unique charisma that he ends up stealing absolutely every movie he appears in. He’s under-appreciated in general, so perhaps the great work he does here will finally be the thing that opens more people’s eyes to what a talented actor he is.
Gyllenhaal and Peña didn’t come alone either. Despite the fact that they get the bulk of the film’s focus, they’re also getting supported by a deep roster of talents. The always likable, always impressive Anna Kendrick shows up and effortlessly elevates an underwritten girlfriend role. A relative newcomer named Natalie Martinez plays the Peña character’s wife, and though she only shows up in a couple scenes, she’s able to prove herself as a real charmer in the time she’s given. Then you’ve got actresses as good as America Ferrera and Cody Horn playing a duo of lady police officers whose involvement in the film doesn’t amount to much more than a couple of cameos.
This is what sets a movie like End of Watch apart from most everything else. When you cast strong actors in even the small roles, your entire film gets colored with an added personality and authenticity that makes the extra effort and payroll dollars more than worth it. Some of the action in End of Watch is too over the top to be believed, some of the drama is so ham-fisted that it should play as sappy, but because it’s presented by top notch talents, it all hits its mark anyway. Though End of Watch is objectively an uneven film that makes a mistake or two, because there’s real talent behind the filmmaking, and because there’s real talent in front of the camera, you’ll likely walk away from it feeling like you’ve seen something special.
