End of Watch (2012) Review

rating: ****

the story: Partners on the police force find themselves embroiled in trouble.

review: Here’s another movie I was initially wowed by but eventually took for granted until a rewatch. Especially in 2020, in which End of Watch suddenly seems impossible. 

This is actually a cop movie in which the cops themselves decide to record their activities. This is after they have already been involved in a service-related shooting incident. And they can’t stay away from trouble. Imagine recommending this to someone outraged this past summer. I don’t understand why End of Watch was so easy to take for granted in 2012, never mind, part of the shift movies started taking, toward almost exclusively blockbusters for audiences and art films for critics. From that vantage point it’s inevitable for everything else to be lost in the shuffle.

And in the process Michael Peña’s career becomes narrowed down to a caricature. Peña is now that motormouth from the Ant-Man movies, which is a great spot, sure. Who else can pull that off? But Peña has so much more to offer. Between this, World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, there’s a whole alternate film history where he’s a major star of great acclaim. Just not this one.

Jake Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, has a movie star career, but likewise if any of his films at all were better appreciated, he would himself be better appreciated. This is a guy who consistently makes good choices, some of the most interesting choices of any modern actor, and yet he gets little enough attention for any of it.

Combine both with the gritty tendencies of David Ayer, who soon enough for pigeonholed as the “urban chaos guy,” and easily enough dismissed, that he doesn’t get any love either. There are few enough directors whose work is distinctive enough, consistent, that you know what you’re going to get, that it is always going to be interesting. Ayer is one of those.

Frank Grillo is in the supporting cast. Eventually he found himself typecast as a thug, so it’s good to see him as an outright good guy. Anna Kendrick, David Harbour help round out the cast, among others.

But this is really a showcase for Peña, Gyllenhaal, Ayer, and a look at how wonderful, and awful, it is to be a cop.