We went to see End Of Watch yesterday, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (as Brian) and Michael Peña (as Mike).
If you are at all a fan of cop/buddy/action films, you won’t want to miss this!
It is like watching an entire HBO series of of a truly great cop show - in one sitting.
Brian and Mike are two cops who are best friends - and you believe it. I would be hard-pressed to think of any film that has two guys being realistic BFF’s better than this one.
Part of this comes from a truly inspired, brilliant “trick” of having Brian film much of this for a film class he is taking. He has his own camera, and even puts little cameras on his shirt and Mike’s shirt, to capture all of the action and conversations they have for his film project. This allows the characters to break the fourth wall and speak to the camera, but they are not speaking to you - the audience - they are speaking to each other and to perhaps Brian’s class. This allows you, the audience, to be an active participant in the events that occur. The comments and side comments made by others, often looking directly at the camera, do not take you out of the action for a single second. The writer(s) were able to use this to truly get into the characters, and by the end of the film, you know these two guys inside and out.
The action is realistic - gritty, violent, sometimes disturbing, and always unexpected; you never know what the hell is going to happen when they answer a call.
I could nitpick about the annoying shaky cam in spots - especially at the beginning of the film - but this eventually subsides and either I got used to it, or it simply didn’t bother me as the film progressed.
I was a big fan of the series “The Shield”, and this film takes that a step further - and even though it is only 109 minutes, you really do feel like you have watched an entire first season of such a show.
Trust me on this one - if you are at all a fan of cop/buddy/action films - you won’t want to miss this film!
I haven’t seen this yet, but I read an article that said the two didn’t like each other at first. They’d never met, let alone worked together. The writer/director David Ayer (who wrote and directed a top notch movie a few years ago called Harsh Times with Christian Bale and Freddy Rodríguez) threw them together with training, training and more training, training that went on for months, as well as ride-alongs with cops where they weren’t coddled at all. They were forced to become close friends or go crazy or drop out of the movie. They became friends, and according to the director, and now you, it shows.
I just wanted to tell you that I finally saw this, and agree 100% with every single word you wrote. Maybe the movie is not getting much attention because the genre seems done to death, but if so, that’s a shame because this one is top-tier level. You really come to care about the characters and what happens to them. I won’t spoil anything, but damn, the ending. Damn.
Glad to hear you liked it too.
It did well at the box office, but I guess we will have to wait for this film to go to DVD or hit the cable channels before others see it.
For those of you who missed it in the theaters (although I believe it is still playing), at least put this on your “to watch” list when it becomes available in other formats. My guess is this thread will be revived sometime in the near future with more glowing comments.
I just watched this on Netflix. I remember finding the trailer interesting, but I forgot about it until it came up on Netflix, and I am quite pleased now that I’ve seen it. It’s definitely a movie that I have not seen before, and that’s saying quite a lot.
If I had to assign it a category, I would be forced to describe it as a "buddy cop docudrama (or “docu-fiction,” or “mockumentary, " though it’s definitely not satire),” but while that is technically correct, it’s also not really any of those things. It somehow manages to achieve a high level of “grab you” interest without really having any apparent overall plot. It’s kind of like the best episode of COPS you’ll ever see.
I don’t really have anything else to say about it that DMark didn’t already, but just that I really enjoyed this movie.
I felt the same way about the ending that I did the ending of Pearl Harbor. (Stay with me; I know End of Watch is a much, much better movie.) It was telegraphed so far in advance that it lost some of the visceral impact. I briefly thought that
both of the cops were going to die
and that caught my interest, but when that didn’t happen and the entirely predictable did, I was a little disappointed.