Review: End of Watch (2012)

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick
Director: David Ayer
Country: USA
Genre: Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: End of Watch opens today

In hindsight, it was inevitable. It wasn’t if, but when. Both the “if” and the “when” refer to David Ayer’s (Street Kings, Harsh Times, S.W.A.T., Dark Blue, Training Day) latest effort as both writer and director, End of Watch, an L.A.-set cop drama that borrows the found footage device (or gimmick if you’re feeling less charitable) popularized three years ago by Paranormal Activity and the countless imitators that followed (and continue to follow), presumably to create a sense of “realness” or verisimilitude otherwise missing or present in a limited capacity in standard-issue cop dramas. If that was indeed Ayer’s purpose, then it’s difficult to reconcile with his decision to drop the found footage device for dramatic purposes or simply because he needed a specific shot or shots to properly set a scene.

On one level, End of Watch is a throwback to early ‘70s crime dramas like The French Connection and The Seven-Ups that offered moviegoers grim-and-gritty, dirt-smeared, morally ambiguous hero-cops cinema vérité-style.

Whatever the reason, the found footage device ultimately becomes a distraction, but perhaps a distraction was exactly what Ayer needed to hide in plain sight no less End of Watch’s rote storytelling, storytelling heavily dependent on familiar genre tropes and genre-specific clichés. In all fairness, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. On one level, End of Watch is a throwback to early ‘70s crime dramas like The French Connection and The Seven-Ups that offered moviegoers grim-and-gritty, dirt-smeared, morally ambiguous hero-cops cinema vérité-style. End of Watch’s two hero-cops, Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), have their faults, among them a propensity for occasionally unnecessary risk-taking and glory hounding. Taylor wants to go to law school and become a detective. To that end, he’s taking pre-law classes, including a credibility-stretching creative elective, thus the found footage conceit.

Despite constant warnings from his superiors, other beat cops, and plainclothes detectives, Taylor brings a camcorder with him on patrol. He also sets himself up with a button-sized video camera and gives the other camera to Zavala. For his part, Zavala goes along to get along, but there’s a real (or rather reel) camaraderie between the two men. While Taylor enjoys the perks of being a police officer, Zavala’s a family man. He’s happily married his high school sweetheart, Gabby (Natalie Martinez), and about to become a father. Those two facts alone usually portend Zavala’s demise, but Ayer postpones Zavala’s reckoning with the Movie Gods by not-so-subtly turning Taylor into a family man. To clarify the passage of time (months, not days or weeks), Ayer gives Taylor a girlfriend, Janet (Anna Kendrick), his presumed equal. Within months, they’re engaged, married, and, in an unsurprising plot development, expecting their first child.

Whatever your perspective, it’ll be difficult to ignore the character clichés and genre tropes Ayer repeatedly, unapologetically, and unironically embraces when it comes to the men in blue he obviously reveres.

Ayer interweaves Taylor and Zavala’s domestic lives, and character-revealing everyday banter with a plot thread involving a Mexican drug cartel. A minor bust opens the figurative door for Taylor to turn detective and with Zavala’s reluctant aid, they make a major drug bust and expose a human trafficking ring tied to the cartel. That, of course, brings them to the cartel’s attention, setting up the obligatory third-act shootout. Ayer exerts significant effort to foreground Zavala and his family as model Mexican-Americans. They’re on the right side of the law and the American Dream after all. In contrast, Ayer depicts the Mexican gang as more (or rather less) than just brutal or ruthless. They’re practically sub-human in their reflexive, cold-blooded use of violence to to protect their turf. Ayer even goes as far as including an African-American drug dealer who, after an awkward wrestling match/fistfight with Zavala, expresses grudging admiration for the police and decries the Mexican gang’s amorality.

Some may consider that contrast a rejection of political correctness. Others will see it as embracing dangerous, demeaning stereotypes of Mexican-Americans or Latinos in general. Whatever your perspective, it’ll be difficult to ignore the character clichés and genre tropes Ayer repeatedly, unapologetically, and unironically embraces when it comes to the men in blue he obviously reveres. When, after nearly two hours of following Taylor and Zavala on routine and not-so-routine patrols finally reaches its end, Ayer gives us the obligatory “He was my brother” line for the last, but certainly not first time. It’s shameless emotional manipulation, meant to wring sobs and/or tears from moviegoers, but like so much else that depends on familiar story elements and character beats, it works—if not intellectually, then viscerally—just as Ayer intended.

Mel Valentin

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Mel Valentin hails from the great state of New Jersey. After attending NYU undergrad (politics and economics double major, religious studies minor) and grad school (law), he made the move, physically, mentally, and spiritually to California, specifically San Francisco. Mel's written more than 1,400 film-related reviews and articles. He's a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.