So many police films tend to make the cops out as easy to hate and impossible to love. It’s only natural to rejoice as another corrupt cop is exposed, taken down and driven out of the system. But things don’t play out like that in David Ayer’s End of Watch, a movie about two young LA police officers, Bryan (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former marine, and Zavala (Michael Pena), who find themselves the targets of a Mexican drug cartel after they discover a stash of their guns and money.
Ayer, who wrote and produced gritty crime flick Training Day (2001), treads a similar line here, providing a hard-hitting exploration of the boys in blue, but with a few notable differences. In Training Day, Ethan Hawke played an officer whose morals were put to the test in a typical case of good cop, bad cop. End of Watch, however, tells the tale of two decent cops doing honest work. Amid explosions, car chases, and gunfights, the film’s protagonists are portrayed as people with families, hopes, and fears—real human beings, then.
Set in South Central, where Ayer spent his teenage years before joining the navy, the film takes the audience on a patrol of LA’s most dangerous neighborhood through Bryan’s handheld camera, part of his project at school where he is pursuing a degree in pre-law. The villains of the piece reflect the changes to the neighborhood once roamed by African-American gangs, but which has now been taken over by Latino baddies.
The film succeeds mainly on the back of solid performances from Gyllenhaal and Pena. While there is a hefty (and impressive) female presence—Anna Kendrick as Janet, Bryan’s love interest, Natalie Martinez as Zavala’s wife, and a pair of tough chick cops played by America Ferrera and Cody Horn—End of Watch is, at its heart, a tale of bro-love, as the chemistry between the two back-slapping buddies elevates the film beyond cop-flick cliché. The attempts at intimacy aren’t all successful—the F-bomb is dropped far too often, the super-shaky-run-and-guns-imagery is a mediocre gimmick, which thankfully ceases almost altogether when things intensify—but ultimately this is a film that gets to the heart of life on the beat.