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Training Day (2001)

thereviewers
May 13, 2015
2 min read

Training Day focuses on rookie LAPD cop Jake Hoyt who is sent onto the streets with Veteran Narcotics Detective Alonzo Harris. As Alonzo pushes his young charge to cross lines and break the rules, Jake soon starts to suspect his training officer has become a rogue cop.

Overall Review Score

6 out of 10

Review

Training Day is a 2001, 122-minute, crime thriller that is loosely based on the LAPD Rampart scandal of the late 1990s where more than 70 officers associated with the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit were implicated in some form of misconduct. Director, Antoine Fuqua blended the 70 officers into one Detective, Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), and set up rookie cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) to identify and deal with Alonzo Harris’s corrupt nature. Training Day attempts to look authentic but its over dramatisation of Alonzo Harris’s corrupt nature and Jake Hoyt’s back and forth morality stance moves the film further and further from reality with every scene that passes. While Training Day does have some interesting scenes, firefights, character development movements and an easy-to-follow corrupt cop storyline, overall its plot suffers some major holes which causes the last 20 minutes of the film descend into lunacy causing the ending to become overtly predictable and the film to lose the tension, kinect energy and gritty nature it had built up in earlier scenes.

Reviewer 1's score & comments:

Score: 5 out of 10

Comments:

After viewing the trailer, I was hoping for a marvellous film that would blow me away with stunning acting, a fabulous story and compelling character development. However, this did not materialise, as in my opinion the storyline was farfetched, and the constant repetition by Harris (Denzel Washington) of ‘do you want to go to jail or do you want to go home?’ started to ruin the film's entertainment value.

Reviewer 2's score & comments:

Score: 7 out of 10

Comments:

Despite the obvious thoughts about how Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) became a cop and how Internal Affairs had not investigated, caught and or prosecuted him for his flagrant disregard for law and order, I was left feeling somewhat underwhelmed by Training Day. While the film continually attempted to wretch up Alonzo Harris’s duplicity, it failed to offset this with the righteous nature of Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) so the audience is essentially treated to a helping of bad cop, worse cop. Additionally to this, the repetitive nature of Alonzo Harris’s dialogue annoyed me – saying something once or twice to reinforce the story is fine but once a character says the same line more than three times it becomes annoying.