The fact that David Ayer is both the sole author of the script and the director of ‘End of Watch’ is quite interesting. If two different individuals would have written the script and directed the movie, respectively, I could have commented that the thin story written by the script writer had to be balanced by the film director, and he picked an interesting manner of filming based on some not very solid pretext in order to achieve what is an interesting movie. As the two are one – David Ayer – I am guessing that the idea about how to make this movie came first and the story was built around it. Of course, this is just a guess.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1855199
Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) and a couple of patrolling cops in the violent low-class districts of LA. One is a WASP, the other is Mexican. They are exemplary cops, actually too good to be true, the kind of cops that save kids from burning houses at the risk of their lives and get decorated for their deeds. They are more than friends, they are brothers, share all secrets, dance at each other’s weddings and hold new born kids. They live and fight crime together and are ready to die together. And death eventually comes after them. Violent and unfair as they live in a violent and unfair world. Ours.
All this is nice, but, frankly speaking, it does not make for a too interesting story. Actually what really happens on screen is not too much and it’s also very predictable. I could put a rather safe bet that at the end one of the cops dies, the other survives to see his funeral, the only question is which fate each of the two will be to occur. There is actually so little action in the film that the script-writer / director added a few minutes at the end describing facts having happened previous to the ending that do not add anything to the story.
(video source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mQYxib26FM)
With no real action to put on screen David Ayer tries to catch our attention with describing the details of the relationship between the two cops and with their colleagues, in the style made famous by ‘The Wire‘ TV series. I like this part, which was supported by the excellent acting of Jake Gyllenhaal (one of my preferred actors) and Michael Peña . The second film directing trick is to use hand-held camera for part of the time. The pretext is the passion of one of the cops for documenting his work, which is mirrored by a similar hobby of one of the gangsters. It is this kind of technology-based detail which became obsolete one or two years after the time the film was made (2012) when any smartphone became a hand-held video camera with social networking becoming a repository and mean of communicating and transferring video files. We are left with an experiment which does not harm too much and makes the viewing of the film more interesting.
At the end, I feel like ‘End of Watch’ despite its qualities risks to disappoint the two categories of viewers that it seems to target. Action movies fans will be disappointed by the too short and too simple cop story. Quality cop dramas fans will be disappointed because the heroes do not enjoy enough time on screen to develop their friendship and make a difference in the violent world that they deal with on daily basis. Both claims could have been solved by a more complex and interesting story and script, but ‘End of Watch’ did not have one.