End of Watch (2012)

Not being a huge fan of either cop movies nor Jake Gyllenhaal, "End of Watch" was not something I was expecting to enjoy in any large capacity. There are often issues that arise with the standard cop drama that I find to be aggravating to my particular tastes. Most noteworthy of those issues is the fact I rarely understand anything that the characters are saying due to the indecipherable "cop speak" and phonebooks full of characters mentioned only once by name, all rattled off in rapid-fire succession in a scene of dense exposition, after which we're expected to have memorized each and every one of them. It works for some, but not myself. I'm just not a huge mark for the cop drama.

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.

Gangster Squad (2013)

I've never been a huge mark for gangster movies. Their plots tend to be a bit overly complicated for me, what with the phone book of names they require us to know, almost all of them ending in "o" or "ni," and the connections between all of them, which when charted out with lines connecting all the dots resembles something akin to a Spirograph drawing. Oddly I find the same stuff in "Lord of The Rings" easy to follow. For some reason I know that it's Gimli, son of Gloin, son of Groin, descendant of Durin, but for some reason I could not tell you why Tony Soprano wants "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero dead. I have no explanation for this.

Movies like "LA Confidential" and "The Departed" just made my head hurt trying to keep up with the plot, to the point I couldn't enjoy them. I guess I'm just a simple man when it comes to gangster movies. Stuff like "Dick Tracy" or "Scarface." Cops are good, gangsters are bad. They shoot at each other. There you go. I'm all for shades of grey and crooked cops and men on the inside and informants and whatnot, but not at the expense of knowing what's going on. I even found "The Godfather" to be slightly frustrating, as good as it was. But that's just me. I don't like olives in my martinis, and I don't like convolution in my mobster plots.

But it seems an accepted fact now that gangster movies need that ridiculous web of connections and plots within plots within schemes within rats in order to even get made. It's just something those movies are supposed to have, but I've always found that to really be annoying because when it's all said and done, the only thing we want is to see the big shoot out at the end, because that's how they all always end. That is the part everyone is there to see in the first place. To have the road to that shoot out be so twisting and turning and doubling back on itself seems pointless, plodding and bordering on pretentious.

*sigh* It's just not exciting unless I've seen 3 hours of impossible-to-follow lead-in...

"Gangster Squad" doesn't have any of that. It was fast paced with a clear and easily digestible plot, and I found it to be something of a breath of fresh air. It was streamlined to the point where there wasn't anything left of the usual annoyances I have with the genre. What's left my not be anything that someone coming into it expecting a film like "LA Confidential" would want, but that's not to say it's bad. In fact, as "dumbed down" as that person may see "Gangster Squad," I greatly preferred it to something more "cerebral," and the reason for that is because it's free of that previously mentioned pretension.

I suppose it's for that same reason that "Gangster Squad" has been thrown under the bus in terms of critical reaction. Not that any of that really matters in the long run, but the 33% that Rotten Tomatoes has this film at is nowhere near the rating it deserves. I guess it's quite telling how deeply those elements of obfuscation have been engrained into the mob movie when a fun, well acted, action packed entry is shunned simply because it lacked those elements. It's a shame.

Listen up, you critics who gave this movie crap for not being "LA Confidential." It's not "LA Confidential." They never meant it to be. Accept this and move on. Stop crying into your notepad filled to the brim with scribbles bemoaning how this movie DARED to be a fun time, stick the pencil in your eye and leave the rest of us who got the point of this movie in peace. Just go pleasure yourself over "Road to Perdition" again or something.

What? Walking away from an explosion? Zero stars.

"Gangster Squad" plays out like a slightly more serious remake of "The Untouchables." Calling it "more serious" may be something of a misnomer, since there is certainly a good amount of humor to be found within, but anyone who saw "The Untouchables" remembers how comic-booky it got. "Gangster Squad" has a similar premise, what with a seasoned cop forming an elite team to take down a powerful mob boss, but this time it's in LA instead of Chicago. And we have better actors than Kevin Costner.

While I wasn't blown away by Josh Brolin's Sgt. O'Mara, the main character, I suppose he did a passable job of squinting and looking like a jaw had grown to gigantic proportions and sprouted legs. I'm not going to complain about his performance. He did what he was supposed to do. He was a hard-ass cop who didn't play by the rules, but damn it, he got the job done! I'm surprised they didn't give him a .44 magnum.

His jawline is actually a detective. It hides its badge under O'Mara's tongue.

I found Ryan Gosling to be more entertaining to watch, even though I'm still not 100% on board with him as an actor. We'll call it 70%. He has been climbing the ladder, but he still reminds me way too much of Casey Affleck, who's rocking a 25%. At least Gosling has the ability to not mumble. He's the reluctant member of the eponymous squad who's also playing the most dangerous game out of anyone, as he's having an affair with Grace (Emma Stone), who just happens to be the "companion" of the villain, Mickey Cohen.

Speaking of him, if there was one reason to see this film, it's Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen. He's another actor I'm usually not overly fond of, but I've got to say this was a really fun performance that he gave. If you were to channel De Niro's Al Capone and Pacino's "Big Boy" Caprice, you'd be in the right ballpark in terms of how fun he is to watch. Because he's a former boxing champion, Cohen is a bit more intimidating on a physical level than most mob boss villains are, and it's rather tense seeing him bare-knuckle throw down with Josh Brolin at the end, because there's a really strong possibility that Brolin is going to get his ass handled to him in a fancy cocktail glass.

I'd like to see Gandolfini do this...

In addition to Sean Penn, two other reasons to see "Gangster Squad" are immediately brought to mind. The first is Robert Patrick as a six-shooter toting cowboy cop who seems like he wandered onto the set from another movie being filmed across the street, but they liked him so much they just rolled with it. He may be out of place, but he's still a badass and possesses the best facial hair of the film. It's glorious. Plus it's Robert Patrick. And that's awesome.

The other reason was Emma Stone. Well, Emma Stone and her legs. There are certain things that I just can't lie about. One of those things is the fact that when it comes to particular people, I am a disgusting pig. I can't lie. So here it is: Emma Stone seems to be on a mission to be the most offensively attractive person I've ever seen in my life, particularly when she's sporting the red hair. And that seductive, Becall-esque, cigarette soaked voice of hers that sounds straight out of a movie from the 40's...good lord. I have a list of body parts I would be willing to saw off myself (or anyone else for that matter) with an allen wrench if it meant that I could merely be in her presence. I don't care how creepy that sounds, I stand by it.

She's also a really good actress. There is that, too.

Seriously, that's not fair, Emma. You're killing me by being so gorgeous.

With all that said, the cast really can't do too much if the rest of what's going on around them isn't entertaining as well, but "Gangster Squad" manages to be exciting throughout, with a good amount of action beats to keep the tempo brisk and engaging, and enough surprisingly brutal violence to satiate the bloodlust of anyone watching for the carnage. And for the kind of movie this is, which is a big budget B-movie harkening back to something that Lee Marvin would be in, that doesn't seem out of place at all.

And what do you know? It's also pretty funny. Some might not like that. Of course when you have lines like "You know the drill, boys" before a guy gets killed via a drill to the face, followed by brains splattering on the wall, followed by Josh Brolin throwing hamburger meat on a grill, it should be obvious what kind of movie this is. And expectations should be adjusted properly. I'm just glad I had fun at a mobster movie for a change.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Gangster Squad" was a lot of fun. It's exciting, it's well acted, the action is brutal, and it doesn't take itself very seriously, which adds to the humor and overall enjoyment. This is not a movie made by a people desperately trying to get an Oscar like most modern gangster films. This is a movie that remembers that those movies used to be a really fun time. Which "Gangster Squad" was. Check it out.