Training Day

Training Day turned out to be by far the most intense buddy cop film we've seen thus far.  Starring Denzel Washington as Alonzo Harris, an experienced LA police officer, and Ethan Hawke as Jake Hoyt, a new officer looking to join Alonzo's narcotics unit.  The movie takes place over one day, which makes it even more intense than some of the other movies. Like many of the movies, the two characters personalities are drastically different. Jake the younger white cop, is very by-the-book, he is law enforcement to make the streets safer, while Alonzo's more into acting like those making the streets dangerous.  We first experience Alonzo's influence on Jake after they catch the college kids with weed.  Instead of arresting them, they only take the drugs.  To Jake's surprise, Alonzo offers him a hit of marijuana, and cracking under pressure, Jake takes it.  Throughout the movie, Alonzo continues to break the law himself, whether it be by drinking and driving, or shooting his "friends" and then plotting a story of how he came to be shot.  Alonzo continues to introduce Jake to the streets, and how the cops go about their job in a street manner, in other words, the illegal ways of the law enforcement.  At one point when Jake snaps at Roger's home, Alonzo talks him into surrendering and going along with him plan of how Roger was shot.  After this Jake seems disgusted with the entire narcotics unit that he thought he wanted to be apart of. The most important part of the movie was when Alonzo tells jake that if he doesn't follow through he will be killed and the news will report that a police officer is survived by a wife and child.  This ends up being the way the movie ends, only it is Alonzo who ends up being killed.

I was surprised by the fact that by the end of the movie the loyalty between partners is totally gone.  This is how the movie differs from most of the other buddy cop films.  Usually the differences between cops brings the two closer, in Training Day the fact that Alonzo thinks he is so much better and above the law, it only ends up hurting him.  Jake realizes during this one day that Alonzo deserves to be the one suffering from all the wrong he had done, and the best way to make a street wise cop suffer is to take away all loyalty he thought he had from his "friends" on the street.