Thursday, October 4, 2001

Denzel has fun being bad in new film
Associated Press

As corrupt Los Angeles police detective Alonzo Harris, Denzel Washington is clearly having a blast in “Training Day.” And the role is so vastly different from the good guys he’s known for playing, it is just as much fun watching him.

Alonzo is so unpredictable, so volatile, it is impossible to take your eyes off him — at least for a little while, until you begin wondering little things, such as: After 13 years on the force, what happened to him that made him this way?

KRT

That’s what rookie Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) wants to know, too. The whole movie takes place during Jake’s first day as a LAPD narcotics officer, with Alonzo as his trainer.

And it’s a really long day. Regular cops must spend years on patrol without the kind of action Jake and Alonzo see over a few hours.

Alonzo beats up suspects on the street for sport then lets them go. He visits drug dealers just to intimidate them. Then he stops by the house of an old friend (Scott Glenn) in the middle of the day, just to chat and drink whiskey.

When the two are driving around together — Alonzo behind the wheel, talking smack, Jake sitting timidly in the passenger seat, unsure how to behave — it’s fascinating.

Like Jake, we do not know whether Alonzo is truly insane or if he is just acting that way to scare Jake, hazing him like a fraternity pledge.

And we would probably care about the answer to that question if we knew more about Alonzo’s past. He alludes to having been idealistic long ago, to caring deeply about wanting to rid the streets of drug dealers the way Jake does now. What made him snap?

It probably was not greed. He steals cash from drug busts, but lives with his girlfriend and son in a small apartment in a dangerous part of the city.

It probably was not addiction, either. He snatches drugs from kids who trek to the ‘hood for a score, but he doesn’t use them himself; he forces Jake to try them instead.

Maybe he’s just bad because it is more fun being bad than good. “To protect the sheep you gotta catch the wolf, and it takes a wolf to catch a wolf.” That’s Alonzo’s mantra, which is far catchier than “To protect and to serve.”

Hawke’s upstanding, moral young officer has to be low-key in contrast to Washington’s. But screenwriter David Ayer does not flesh him out, either.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who made “Bait” and “The Replacement Killers,” keeps a crisp pace and achieves a dark, gritty mood throughout the film. Then he makes the mistake of overwhelming us with a protracted, bloody shootout at the end that is totally unnecessary.

The stunt casting is gratuitous and amusing: Snoop Dogg as a wheelchair-bound crack dealer, Dr. Dre as a member of Alonzo’s secret narcotics team, and Macy Gray as a strung-out, chain-smoking, gold-tooth-wearing wife of a drug dealer.

And the much-hyped soundtrack collaboration of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and David Bowie on a remake of Bowie’s “This is Not America” — now titled “American Dream” — never plays during the movie.