Two Days 'Til Retirement

In a weekend where there were four major theatrical releases, at least two high-ceiling limited releases and one major expansion into wide release, there's one reason that people didn't go out and enjoy Dredd, an excellent genre flick which sadly finished in sixth place at the box office and hasn't gotten the love it deserves. It wasn't House at the End of the Street or The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which mostly attracted young women. It wasn't Trouble with the Curve, which appealed mainly to older folks. And it wasn't The Master, which is more like Oscar bait than blockbuster. No, for a film appealing mainly to young men, Dredd was hampered by the fact that most of their potential audience was instead down the hall with End of Watch. This movie is perfectly in director David Ayer's wheel house. The writer/director has been basing his stories in Los Angeles for over a decade, and he's best known for the man who wrote Training Day, which won Denzel Washington an Oscar and is this century's epitome of Los Angeles crime drama. All this time later, and Ayer still has stories to tell about the LAPD, though thankfully they're not all about corruption and scandal, as he proves here.

Just another day in the office.

Police officers and best friends, Officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Pena) are two of the hottest shots, regularly seen patrolling the worst areas of South Central Los Angeles. End of Watch details their close friendship, rivalries and pranks with other officers, and their everyday lives, which include Zavala's expecting a child with wife Gabby (Natalie Martinez) and Taylor's burgeoning romance with a Janet (Anna Kendrick), whom he meets at school. When the duo discover an even darker side to the city in the form of the Mexican drug cartels, Taylor and Zavala find themselves on the wrong side of Hispanic gangs that have lately been rising in prominence in the area. One night, that brewing conflict will all come to a very violent conclusion

No, ma'am, this isn't Magic Mike.

Strangely, though, that finale really takes its time to come around, meaning that most of the first two acts of the film are not intensely focused on the cartels but the everyday challenges of being a beat cop in LA. Having had a grandfather on the force in Atlantic City, I appreciate how the movie took care to present the men and women of the law as normal people with families and problems and times both good and bad. Ayer humanizes his heroes, and while they're considered among the best of their class, Taylor and Zavala are still unpredictable, prone to both mistakes and heroics. Most importantly, they're men who love their jobs, which makes it incredibly easy to root for them.

Paperwork: the stuff that keeps the world spinning.

Ayer also makes an effort to portray the story from a gritty, street-level perspective. To that end, he has incorporated the popular "found footage" method by showing the footage as being recorded by the two officers via a handicam and some fairly sophisticated flash cameras attached to their uniforms, all as part of a college project for Taylor. It does a great job of making much of the film feel natural and off the cuff, but it does present its own set of problems. For one, while it's feasible for some police helicopter footage to make its way into the film to present a sense of scale, some of the movie contains far less likely cam footage, for instance from the perspective of the Latino gang that just happens to be recording their own misdeeds at the same time as our heroes. It's far less natural than the police footage, and gives far too much away, as I would have preferred more mysterious and less predictable antagonists. Also, the found footage attempt turns in a few clunkers, as more than a few occasions see scenes apparently not captured by anybody's camera, but are shot just the same. Ayer is quoted as saying (in an interview on Open Letters Monthly) that if you're wondering who is carrying the camera, then he lost you. Well, as a critic, he did lose me. It wasn't often, but occasionally my thought process turned to the fact that nobody could have been casually shooting at a certain moment. Thankfully, those were few and far between, and most of the camera efforts were done well enough to escape serious scrutiny.

...And there was much rejoicing.

Of course, none of this would have been worth anything if not for the excellent acting and chemistry of leads Gyllenhall and Pena. Ayer did a great job preparing the two actors for their constant partnership throughout the film, and it really shows in their ability to bounce seemingly random things off one another from scene to scene while still remaining relevant to the story. Gyllenhaal has struggled to define himself in modern Hollywood, going from young talent to pseudo action star to the character-driven performances in which he often excels. While he has sometimes struggled with consistency, that doesn't happen here, and he brings his special brand of intensity that often worms its way into his best work. Pena meanwhile has always been excellent, while not necessarily getting the choicest roles (the lot of Latinos in the movie industry, unfortunately). Still, he's often the best part of even bad movies, and he rewards Ayer's confidence in him by simply being the most wonderful, animated thing on the screen at any given time. Together the pair's antics are as authentic as anything I've seen in theaters this year, and their interaction with the surrounding landscape looks completely natural and familiar. While the film mainly centers around its leads, the pair get a lot of support from Kendrick and Martinez, as well as Frank Grillo, America Ferrera, Cody Horn and David Harbour as their fellow officers.

...here's the bad news...

The only real problem with End of Watch is its mess of an ending, which is almost completely predictable if you actually pay attention to the story (or the trailers, for that matter), and understand the usual cop movie cliches. This isn't really a surprise, as Ayer seems to like his tragedy-laden final acts, and to be fair it really doesn't feel out of place in the grand scheme of things. But for once I would love to be surprised, and Ayer just isn't the director who is going to do that for me. End of Watch is still an inspired production, with much more to like than not. Ayer needs to up his writing skills though, especially if he's going to keep working around treatments of the same subject matter. While I still believe Dredd is the best option for you action lovers in theaters right now, End of Watch is a more than solid second option while awaiting Looper's release this coming weekend.

Bare-Knuckle Boxes with Wolves

In Taken they kidnapped Liam Neeson's daughter. In Unknown they stole his identity. In this film, they take... his wife, his civilization and his body heat? As awkward as comparisons get, it's an apt one for Neeson's newest thriller, The Grey. Once known for his thinking man's roles, Neeson has reinvented himself as an action hero these past couple of years. While the actor has more than enough talent to be believable in such roles, I commented last year how the trope of taking things from his characters in order to elicit payback was already getting a bit old. So when The Grey promised to deliver that same plot thread - taking everything away from Neeson while pitting him against man-eating wolves - one could be forgiven for thinking that things would not be so different. Sure, Neeson's great white hunter is plopped in the wintry wilds of Alaska with little enough to keep him vertical, but with all that, isn't this just another film where we take stuff from him to see what happens? Haven't we seen all this before? As it so happens, perhaps not.

A failed proposal for a seventh Lost season

John Ottoway (Neeson) is a security guard at a remote Alaskan oil drilling site, protecting the workers from the hunting wolves who creep into the territory. He hasn't been happy since his wife left him, and considers it his lot to live amongst the ex-cons and assholes who inhabit this type of workplace in the middle of nowhere. On the last day on the job, he and several of his crew are flying back to civilization when their plane crashes amid a wild snow storm, it is up to the survivalist Ottoway to lead the other survivors to safety. It's not just the sub-freezing temperatures and the lack of food that threatens to shorten their lifespans however, as the half-dozen men find themselves relentlessly hunted by a large pack of predatory wolves, who are happy to pick the men off one by one to fill their own bellies.

You won't recognize those faces after they've been ripped clean off

Based on the Ian Mackenzie short story "Ghost Walker", The Grey reunites Neeson with director Joe Carnahan, who was the creative force behind 2010's underrated The A-Team. Unlike that exciting popcorn action thriller, however, things are a bit more believable in this go around. Though the tale has its fair share of close calls, there are no mid-air escapes from flying aircraft in parachuting tanks. By grounding the story firmly in reality, Carnahan had to do an excellent job to avoid the entire narrative becoming "party goes to point A, character X dies, party goes to point B" throughout. Thankfully, Carnahan was indeed up to the job, and he does some amazing things by using weather elements to obscure attacking wolves and creating tension through obscuring what the audience can see to only slightly more than the characters can. He even lines up some beautiful shots when given the option, though that's kept thankfully to a minimum to make the wide open spaces of the outside world feel extremely claustrophobic. Despite the talent involved, it's mother nature that becomes the true star of The Grey; every time we find our eyes searching an entire shot for potential dangers, the film has succeeded in scaring the living crap out of us, seemingly without trying.

Is there no problem booze can't solve?

Back to the talent, however; this might be the best performance I've seen from Neeson in years, and John Ottoway is easily the best of his action-themed characters, with flaws, demons, and burdens to overcome beyond the physical. Neeson is actually allowed to express depth in his character beyond displaying a throaty growl when annoyed, and the effect is staggering: Ottoway becomes easy to root for and sympathize with, even as his backstory is slowly plumbed through over the course of the film. Another surprising development is how many of the secondary characters are actually detailed to the point of likable, especially Frank Grillo as Diaz, a hard-shelled bastard and chief rival of Ottoway. Also managing to stand out were Dermot Mulroney, Joe Anderson (who I last saw in the great 2010 film The Crazies) and Dallas Roberts as fellow survivors caught in an unbelievable scenario. What impressed me most was that Carnahan did not just allow these characters to be disposable stand-ins and let Neeson run the show. While those who get in-depth introspection do so only after a few of their fellows have become dog chow, the levels to which they are risen to is remarkable, and by the end you're hoping your favorite can make that leap, can escape those sharp teeth just a little while longer.

Next stop for these guys: Cancun!

Another nice addition was the question of faith, and how people can believe in an almighty God or an afterlife even in the face of such disaster (or in the case of some characters, their inability to embrace the idea). It's no minor plot thread, as the film's hardships are as much spiritual as they are physical. In one scene, Ottoway curses God, demanding that he offer some proof of his existence so that he can believe in something, only to bitterly come to the conclusion that he can only rely on himself. The elements of fear and fighting for survival also play major parts, and none of these things feel forced or out of place when actively present in the film. These characters aren't planning to survive for the plain sake of surviving, and it's refreshing to see that here.

Yup, he's getting too old for this shit...

But in the end, it's Neeson's show, as we all knew it would be. What we didn't know was that for all intents and purposes, The Grey would raise Neeson to new heights. The aging star expects that he'll work these kinds of films for another year or so (as long as his knees can handle it, he says). If his action films could all be up to the same caliber as The Grey, I'd have no cause to argue. Far better than much of his recent work, it's the #2 movie of 2012. It's not just an action flick. It's not just a Liam Neeson vehicle. It's quality cinema, and well worth your time.