Imagine my surprise, then, when "End of Watch" not only wound up being an intensely enjoyable experience, but also wound up being one of the better films I saw from 2012. In fact, had I actually seen it in 2012, it very well might have made an appearance near the back half of my Top 10 of the year list. It would have been a tough decision, but "End of Watch" had the potential to replace "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" in the number 10 slot, as bad as I would feel not including it. In any case, "End of Watch" would have at least made an honorable mention.
But that's not to say that "End of Watch" was enjoyable in the same way "The Hobbit" was. Where "The Hobbit" was a fun time full of wonderment and adventure, "End of Watch" was an intense blast of violence and fear that looks at the underbelly of the dark side of humanity and the near nightmarish existence of those who have to deal with it every day with a light the intensity of an atomic explosion. It is brutally uncompromising, unrelentingly intense, and heartrendingly humanizing.
Guess you have to laugh or go crazy in this job.
"End of Watch" follows two LAPD cops, Brian (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike (Michael Peña) through their daily routine of being police officers in one of the most dangerous beats in America. Once they run afoul of a powerful drug cartel, they find themselves marked men on the streets, and the danger seems to increase on a daily basis until a climatic and stunning final confrontation.
This is all told from the viewpoint of Brian and anyone else holding a camera, since "End of Watch" is technically a "found footage" movie. This is both effective and detrimental to the film, for reasons I'll get into later, but for now let's talk about why it works so well for this story.
The main reason this works so well is for the same reason any decent found footage movie works well: it puts us in the mindset of the characters. When Brian is running down a dark alleyway in the middle of the night, the flashlight on the end of his gun the only source of illumination as he chases after a huge gang member, it's almost like a horror movie. And it's not hard to feel just a bit of how scared that cop must be. This is especially so after seeing that the huge gang member had a few minutes prior stabbed another cop in the eye and has currently absconded with another female officer to do who knows what to her.
Violence has a tendency to erupt at the drop of a hat. There's no telling whether or not that person they stop is going to calmly go along with the process, or if they're going to pull out a gun and start shooting. Either case is just as likely. And as we follow Brian and Mike through their daily routine, it's easy to get jumpy whenever they so much as talk to anyone. It got to the point that I would get nervous whenever Brian or Mike were being polite and relaxed with people because I suspected that something bad could happen, and they wouldn't be ready for it.
Michael Peña is currently pointing a gun at that guy. You'd be doing the same. Just in case.
In addition, the film also shows the gang members causing most of the trouble as they do their thing, and later as they plot Brian and Mike's demise. This is the only bit of story outside of the main character's point of view that we get, which means that we aren't as in the dark as we would be during a normal found footage film, which both eliminates the need for clunky or overly convenient exposition and also elevates the tension since we know what's coming. But at the same time this also brings to harsh light the biggest issue with the film, and the one hurdle that the audience will need to overcome to not be irritated.
This issue is always the biggest one for any found footage movie, and it is always a question consisting of two parts: Who is filming this, and why to do they continue to do it?
Brian is filming his daily routine as part of a class he's taking. In addition to a handheld video camera, he has a small one that he clips on to his shirt (which also gets incredible hi-def picture, picks up every sound despite nobody wearing a microphone, and has amazing storage capacity), so that makes sense. Most of the time he's using the handheld one, but whenever there's action going on it switches to the shirt camera, which has more of a first-person view. That all makes sense. Of course that's putting aside the legality of Brian openly filming all of this police procedure, which I'm not entirely sure of.
But here's where it gets kind of stupid. Why are the gangsters filming this stuff? I suppose I could see someone filming the occasion as they pile into a van and perform a drive-by shooting of a rival gang, but why would they still be filming during the shooting itself? Wouldn't their hands be kind of full? Why would the rival gang be conveniently filming a seemingly random, trivial conversation at that very moment the other gang drove by and shot them up? Why would they continue to film as bullets started flying? Why would the person being shot at just stand there out in the open, making sure the van with Mexicans firing AK-47s out of it was nicely in frame? Why would they shove a camera in the face of their fallen comrade screaming "Ey yo, B, you okay?! You okay, B?!" instead of actually helping them?
And if this is the kind of thing that jumps out at you, "End of Watch" also has a very strange thing going on that I like to call the "God Camera." Every once in a while the movie will reach a point where there's simply no possible way that they could justify anybody holding a camera for any reason, even for a found footage movie. Either everybody has a gun in their hand, or everybody there is all dead. Or both. So at that point, instead of getting either creative or insultingly stupid with it, the filmmakers seem to have simply decided "screw it" and had a camera just THERE, like you would see in any normal movie. While this does make the action more coherent, I had to ask two questions: "Who is filming this now?" and "If we're going to switch like that, why have the rest of it be found footage in the first place?"
Seriously. Who the hell is filming this shot?
If this is the kind of thing that bugs you, then "End of Watch" might be a little irritating. But despite that little unfortunate side effect of found footage movies, this movie was still an experience that knocked my socks off. The characters all felt so incredibly real, and Michael Peña in particular was simply stunning, but the entire cast deserves a lot of credit. And it's really important in a found footage movie that the acting be top notch naturalistic, or it's simply not going to work at all. By the time "End of Watch" was over, and the shocking ending hit me in the face before leaving with a seemingly random but oddly poignant final scene, there wasn't a moment where I hadn't bought these characters completely.
It may not do anything overly unique with the story, what with the shades-of-grey characters of both police and criminals who are mostly portrayed not as "good vs. evil" but simply as people caught in a savage, unforgiving world and doing what they can to survive. But how many variations on a police story can you really have anyway? What's important is how well it tells the story, and "End of Watch" tells its story extremely well. And it tells it while being intense and tragic as hell.
Check out the trailer for "End of Watch" (NSFW)
THE BOTTOM LINE - "End of Watch" is a gritty, intense, and dark film that doesn't pull too many punches with the violence or how real it comes across. Apart from some irritation with the point of view and how exactly we're seeing all this, it's one of the most powerful films that I've seen from 2012. Michael Peña should probably be up for some awards for it. Seriously, you should check this one out, guys, because it's really freaking good.
No comments:
Post a Comment