Training Day

It’s hard to say whether Training Day is really a buddy cop film. It misses some of the components, like catching a major villain in the end. At first, since I’ve never seen this movie, I just thought that things were going to be out of order. It seemed that the bonding moment(s) were in the beginning, like when Alonzo said to Jake “No matter what I say, you did the right thing” after beating up the two guys trying to rape the high school girl. And Jake seems to take Alonzo’s advice and start not following the rules completely, at least the small ones. But as the movie progresses there are more twists and turns that I think throws the audience off. One of the major components of a buddy cop film is the big argument or tensions point between the two cops, which usually happens in the beginning of the movies. But this time it was at the end. And there wasn’t just one – there was the point where Jake was going to kill Alonzo for committing murder during the arrest and making up a story, and then the very end where Jake confronts Alonzo at his home. And as King mentioned, this is one of the films where there’s no happy ending for the cops. Alonzo ends up getting shot to death by the Russian gang and I think even for Jake it isn’t good for him because he’s been beaten and left disappointed in a field where he thought he could help people, only to find out that there are crooked cops in the big leagues of the police force. The only thing I wonder is if Alonzo really did like Jake and thought he would be a good narcotics officer, or if he really did just be nice to use him as a pawn.

I’m not real sure about race in this movie. Differences are definitely pointed out in the movie, where there are different gangs and the “street” language of each group is different. They are shown as all being bad asses or living in a ghetto area, and it seems that the film joked a little about naive white teenage boys trying to buy drugs with them showing up in a girly green Volkswagen Beetle. Definitely stands out compared to Alonzo’s car. I know race played a part in this movie, but as far as Alonzo versus Jake, I’m not real sure. There was the obviously lack of knowledge on Jake’s end compared to Alonzo and his streets smarts, but is that race or just experience in the field? And then there’s Jake versus the different groups they encountered. Everybody judged Jake, even the other narcotics team members. With the team, I think it was experience versus non-experience. But with the other race groups, I think it may have been a white versus Mexican, Black, whatever. I know it’s significant, I’m just not sure how…