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.

Into the Ashes (2019)

rating: ***

the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.

review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes.  I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo.   Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook.  (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.) 

Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.

But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor.  I know, who?  There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire.  Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.

Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made.  Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher.  The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role.  As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person.  If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.

And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate.  Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity.  I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will.  But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters.  Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.

And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has. 

Donnybrook (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A U.S. army vet goes to extreme lengths to improve life for his family.

review: There's now a lineage of movies from the past decade that needs pointing out: Warrior (2011) to Hell or High Water (2016) to Donnybrook (2019), which will be perhaps the best and easiest way to explain what Donnybrook accomplishes.

Warrior was an MMA movie that was anything but an MMA movie.  It wasn't the MMA version of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, but rather a movie that featured mixed martial arts but wasn't about mixed martial arts.  It was about the contrasting fortunes of a pair of brothers destined to collide all over again (in or out of the octagon).  It was above all else great filmmaking.  Hell or High Water was a latter-day western, a Great Recession story about a pair of outlaws who were also brothers.  They were both concerned with matters of the modern world we often don't focus on, how easy it is to fall behind when everyone's so focused on the glories of getting ahead.  But the reality is, there's a large percentage of the population that routinely struggles. 

Donnybrook is a powerful, poetic experience.  It maintains a razor focus on its characters.  It features acts of grizzly violence.  Interestingly, the only time director Tim Sutton actually shows the violence is perhaps the worst but also the most routine: when a scene of domestic violence plays out inside of a car.  It's fair to say that most of this is metaphor, that unlike Warrior, which ends up spotlighting the MMA tournament it builds toward, the eponymous backwoods version of that event in Donnybrook is really only glimpsed at the very end.  Where Warrior and Hell or High Water trace a sequence of events, Donnybrook follows its lead characters as they meet their various fates.

It's a movie where the villain has no redeeming qualities.  This is an era that has often put villains in a sort of sympathetic spotlight, but not Donnybrook.  There's never any hope of redemption for Frank Grillo, who had his breakthrough role in Warrior, which led to Captain America: Winter Soldier, where he first inhabited this kind of character.  Grillo's sister is played by Margaret Qualley, who nearly stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from much bigger actors.  Between the two performances, she has easily become a personal favorite.  Grillo's counterpoint is Jamie Bell, once an adorable young actor and now turned into grizzled veteran, and perhaps this is his perfect role, the army vet with nowhere to turn but sheer desperation.  James Badge Dale, who seems to have been cast out from Hollywood proper, turns in a typically compelling performance as the only cop who might've been able to intervene in these desperate lives, having firsthand experience as he does.

The whole experience is handled expertly, from how it opens to how the story circles back to that point, and the rich music score that punctuates every moment, knowing exactly when to pivot, as the story itself does.  Apparently what little exposure it has had fixates on the violence, but doesn't seem to understand how little there really is, or what any of it means.  A pity.  But one that shouldn't end up being the final word.