About half way through End of Watch, the two patrolman heroes played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena receive a call from a female cop in distress. What they find when they track her down offers the kind of jolt that mainstream Hollywood thrillers rarely provide.
Director of End of Watch, David Ayer gives us street-level snapshots of the work of the LAPD as they go on patrol in search of the three major food groups: guns, money and drugs. Officer Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal) is studying filmmaking. He has attached a miniature camera to his chest, along with that of his partner Mike Zavala (Pena) and he brings a camcorder out on patrol too. The things they encounter and film range from a gang member accused of intimidating a mailman to a wide-eyed junkie who complains that her toddlers have gone missing. (Where they've gone, when it's revealed, is heartbreaking.)
It seems that everyone in the picture, good guys and bad has a camera and is intent on immortalizing themselves on YouTube. This makes for jerky, hand-held shooting but also adds to the sense of reality.The bad guys are horribly written, possessing a vocabulary that doesn’t extend much beyond angry swearing and filled with the mindset of a Grand Theft Auto villain. Yet it doesn’t decrease particularly from the experience. You might not be able to make much sense of their enemies, but you still don’t want them to get shot which shows that the plot and characters are able to capture the audience’s attention mainly due to the use of the “found footage” technique which gives viewers the point of view of the characters, basically saying what they see is what the audience see. All in all Ayer’s violent, foul-mouthed thriller succeeds in moving more than most other cop films out there.
3.5/5
Ali
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