End Of Watch - Blu-ray Review

'Putting a camera in Brian's hands does very little extra for the film and switching between that and 'normal' modes of directing doesn't make a whole load of sense.'

David Ayer may have been the writer behind Training Day, giving his latest directorial offering, End Of Watch, a great deal of positive heritage, but he is also the writer of S.W.A.T and the director of Street Kings, neither of which are hugely successful cop dramas. Which Ayer, the obvious questions runs, is going to show up in his latest?

The answer is, inevitably, a touch of both personas although, happily, the Training Day side is on top for the most part. End Of Watch is a strangely modern affair, with the central conceit being that Brian (Jake Gyllenhaal) is absolutely stacked with technology in a bid to film his life as an L.A. cop. Alongside this sits Ayers' sometime-absent fondness for gritty realism. Occasionally the two jar off each other (whenever the Latino gang members, or anyone who conveniently happens to be filming themselves, show up) but most of the time this is a fairly happy marriage.

That statement though ignores the obvious weirdness you have to deal with when being faced with a character constantly filming themselves, then stopping and another camera beyond the fourth wall taking over. End Of Watch keeps up its conceit of Brian's filming habit only when it absolutely needs to, with Ayers' own cameras taking over when an extra angle is needed. You wonder why he couldn't just shoot the whole thing in shaky-cam, if that was the effect he required. Putting a camera in Brian's hands does very little extra for the film and switching between that and 'normal' modes of directing doesn't make a whole load of sense.

In conjunction with partner Michael Peña, Gyllenhaal treads what feels like a realistic beat throughout, Ayer playing to his realism-inclined strength and building a world of hoodlums and varying degrees of cop personality. The plot, when you step back from it, is a little flimsy but the idea of just following these two for a few months is attractive enough once the director lulls you into it. The one complaint is perhaps that the hero worship for these two, and probably cops in general, perhaps goes a little further than the film can comfortably sell you on. Being law enforcement superheroes is one thing but literally rescuing a family from a burning building? Perhaps one act of deifying too far.