The marvel of Washington's performance is that, most of the time, you want him to get away with it. Washington has played deeper before, been more profound-but he certainly has never been this fun to watch.
The film opens ominously, with a bloody sun ascending the smog-bitten Los Angeles sky. An alarm clock rings just once before Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) hits the snooze. We see his face: instantly awake, vigilant, nervous. Jake, a young father whose police experience consists mostly of writing traffic tickets, is beginning his first day of training in an elite narcotics squad of the LAPD, headed by Alonzo. What happens today, as explained in conversation between Jake and his wife, could make or break this young cop's career. "You better not fuck this up," she tells him, only half-joking.
Jake meets his boss in a coffee shop. Alonzo looks more like P. Diddy than Joe Law: he wears black leather and gold chains and drives a souped-up ghetto mobile. Their dialogue, here and throughout the movie, is masterfully written street poetry, full of unexpected zingers and seemingly random anecdotes-a bit like Tarantino, but without Tarantino's forced colorfulness. (Screenwriter David Ayer is, incredibly, the scribe behind "The Fast and the Furious"; if there were Oscars for most improved, he'd be a shoo-in.)
After breakfast, they engage in a routine marijuana bust. So far, so good. And then Alonzo brings the ghetto mobile to a screeching halt in the middle of a busy intersection, puts a gun to Jake's head, and forces him to smoke the marijuana that they have just confiscated. Good morning, Officer Hoyt!
It's here that "Training Day" turns into wonderfully twisted fun, as Alonzo introduces Jake to the tricks of a rogue cop's trade. In a funny scene involving Snoop Doggy Dog and a well-placed ballpoint pen, we learn how dealers will swallow their own product to avoid a shakedown. After catching a would-be rapist, Alonzo threatens to cut off his testicles, but doesn't make an arrest. The victim's thug cousins, he explains, will take care of that. The duo then breaks into an alleged crack den using a forged search warrant. More substances are consumed, by both Alonzo and Jake.
Alonzo, obviously enjoying himself, claims it's all in the name of justice; he has one of the most impressive arrest records in the LAPD. Jake is horrified but plays along-his career, and life, could be on the line.
"Training Day" is a fairly obvious morality play, with Washington playing the devil to Hawke's Young Goodman Brown. The film sidesteps more topical issues of racial profiling and the War on Drugs in favor of more timeless themes: Can you accomplish good by doing evil? Must you become a monster to defeat the monsters? The questions are provocatively posed, although we don't get a satisfying answer: Alonzo's effectiveness as a cop remains ambiguous at film's end.
The film's action all takes place in a single day, a structural gimmick that operates as a double-edged sword. The time compression heightens the sense that, at any moment, Alonzo is capable of doing anything. (He's fond of saying "Boom!") On the other hand, so much happens in one day that it stretches belief. This isn't just your typical training day; this also happens to be the day when a conspiracy involving the highest levels of the LAPD reaches its culmination. For good measure, the script also throws in some machine-gun-toting Russian mobsters. The film's allegorical aspirations and gritty realism finally make an uneasy match. The end of the film draws out for far too long, as director Antoine Fuqua tries to wrap up all the themes and subplots that he has set into motion.
Until those final 20 minutes, however, I was too enthralled to care. Hawke, an underrated actor who has nevertheless made some very interesting choices over the years ("Gattaca," "Hamlet"), matches Washington every step of the way. His Jake is tougher and wilier than he first appears, and his pairing with Alonzo works both as a confrontation of competing moralities and as a face-off between two evenly matched warriors.
Fuqua, a music video alum whose previous fare ("Bait, "The Replacement Killers") displayed visual acumen but precious little heart, outdoes himself here. The Los Angeles he paints, a war zone of drugs and housing projects, is as jittery and hardbitten as the characters. He makes "Training Day" an edgy, energetic ride into a modern heart of darkness.