End of Watch is Colors for the modern era. An efficient and effective series of scenes that clearly highlight the danger of being an inner city cop in Los Angeles that keeps coming back to a slightly clumsy storyline which ultimately prevents the film from being truly memorable.
Brian Taylor (Jake Gylenhaal) and Miguel ‘Mike’ Zuvala (Michael Pare) are an inseparable pair of experienced and dedicated policemen servicing a high crime area in LA. They share a long partnership which affords an easy shorthand conversational style and teasing and taunted that would be deemed racist and offensive if overheard by the wrong people.
Despite only being recently cleared of culpability after a ‘hot shoot’ that resulted in the deaths of two suspects (in an excellent adrenalin fuelled car chase that opens the film), Brian feels the need to flout the rules by filming their daily patrols for his external filmmaking class. This requires both he and Mike to wear small buttonhole cameras which see what they see, on top of the standard police cameras that everyone is now familiar with thanks to shows like Cops and a million viral videos of cop chases gone wrong.
It’s a reasonable enough explanation for the ‘shakey cam’ style of the film, but doesn’t explain why practically everyone else in LA including gang members and vicious criminals feel the need to film everything they do as well…
Brian is a stock standard white guy. Mike a Latino guy. We are lead to believe that they’ve worked the same area for many years. They know the locals, recognise the threats and do what they can to make the place better.
Much of the film is spent discussing the differences in the cultures, from a work, lifestyle and family perspective. In fact when Brian starts dating Janet (Anna Kendrick) in a distinct departure from his normal ‘bang ‘em a few times and move on’ approach, Mike implores him to marry her and get started with the kids. Because that’s how it’s done in his culture.
Their beat is right smack dab in the middle of a turf war between the black gangs that have peddled drugs and committed ‘mildly serious’ crimes for years, and the ever expanding numbers of Latino gangs that are taking over territory, peddling drugs and committing more ‘majorly serious’ crimes in the area.
In a short space of time Brian and Mike keep running across the same groups of likely types – both black and Latino – with evidence piling up that something more dramatic is afoot that ‘nickel bags on the corner’ and bag snatches.
When a semi-routine traffic stop culminates with the confiscation of a high powered automatic weapon and large amounts of cash, eyebrows are raised on both sides of the law. When a people smuggling ring and a separate house full of severed limbs (yup) are discovered, things heat up further.
Other impediments to their everyday enjoyment include overbearing superiors, painful colleagues and difficult suspects, not to mention the gang of heavily armed, streetwise-smack talking and eminently dangerous Latinos that resent the very existence of cops in their hood.
But Brian and Mike just keep on being everyday heroes, helping the innocent, pursuing the guilty and keeping the tone light with their witty repartee, always with a snappy comeback and an impromptu and irreverent comparison of cultures.
While the film veers dangerously close to heavy handed with certain plot developments and the convenience of many consecutive coincidences that have Brian and Mike around the corner from seemingly every 911 call, the film is anchored by a series of tense and extremely taut scenes. Most of these sequences occur on location and in real time, with the pair entering the homes of strangers to investigate claims or follow up on the case, only to often find more than they bargained for.
The strength of these scenes is that we, like the cops, have no idea of what is around the next corner or what or who they are about to find. There are several such sequences in End of Watch, and without them it would collapse under the weight of itself.
Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. End of Watch might not have much staying power and the primary plotline appears shakier the more you think about it, but the house to house searches are what makes the film worth at least one watch.
