WAR ZONE DIARY

Training Day (R) Warner Brothers

Training Day is a brilliantly written and directed urban blood bath set in
Los Angeles's mean streets of drug dealers, gangbangers and undercover
detectives. Denzel Washington is brutally cruel as Alonzo Harris, a corrupt
narcotics detective taking advantage of rookie officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan
Hawke) on his first day of training for an elite detective squad. As
Washington's character sinks deeper into completing his own cash-fueled
agenda, Hawke's character is forced to fight a very different battle
against crime than he anticipated at the start of the day. Director Antoine
Fuqua (The Replacement Killers) builds the film's ever-increasing tension
to a series of gut-wrenching crescendos that put the movie on a par with
Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant.

Alonzo Harris isn't merely bitter about the swamp of crime he's dedicated
his life to; he's chosen to lord over the L.A. underworld he resides in as
a kind of urban cop king. He and Jake ride around L.A. in Alonzo's
ghetto-fabulous office, a black '78 Monte Carlo complete with low-rider
approved hydraulics. With dark-tinted glass, the car is a camouflaged
implement of war and a badge of jurisdiction right out of Alonzo's warped
ghetto-fed imagination. The day starts out early, with Jake kissing his
wife and young baby goodbye before dawn, but it passes with events that
expose tragic ethical faults in both Alonzo's and Jake's characters.

Denzel Washington is so utterly comfortable inside the gray area of crime
mentality that he tricks the audience into viewing him as a protagonist.
The close duality between Alonzo and Jake is written into the script but
Washington over-achieves his performance in much the same way that Harvey
Keitel did in Bad Lieutenant. Washington immerses himself in the role
beyond self-judgement and in so doing puts himself out further than he has
in more limiting roles. With so far to plunge, Washington makes Alonzo's
descent into corruption and evil a virtuoso's study in defeat. Ethan Hawke
also gets high marks for giving a muscular yet subtle portrayal of an
ambitious rookie forced to learn 10 years of information in one day.

Training Day raises uneasy questions about the tendrils of corruption that
reach deep into America's corridors of power. Inspired by the 1998
"Rampart" police division scandal, David Ayer has embraced a slice of
American law and justice that is as endemic as the crime it seeks to
annihilate.

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