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'Training Day': It will grip you and not let go • Three and half stars our of four By
Bryce Casselman Every person on this Earth has been put in the situation where they have had someone they looked up to someone or someone they wanted to like them, who has asked them to do something they feel is wrong. The decisions a person makes in these situations may be nothing at all, but these decisions may also be a defining point that leads them down a path to greatness. In Training Day, the new movie by director Antoine Fuqua (The Replacement Killers, Bait), Jake Hoyt, played by Ethan Hawke (Hamlet, Snow Falling on Cedars), is a rookie cop spending a day with one of the best and most-decorated narcotics officers in Southern California, in hopes to get a place as one of the elect on his team. But as the day progresses, Hoyt finds himself having to choose between what he believes is right and the man who holds his future and a gun in the palm of his hands. Denzel Washington, (Remember the Titans, The Hurricane), plays Alonzo Harris, a tough, self-guided cop who believes there are only two kinds of people in the world, wolves and sheep, and that sometimes you have to break the rules to kill the wolf and protect the sheep. Training Day is the kind of movie that you come out of tired because every muscle in your body has been trying to get away from the energy and suspense happening on the screen in front of you. It is rich, frightening and almost flawless in its story line. Both Washington and Hawke give lush performances with the former giving a powerful and persuasive performance of a man who is complicated and completely focused and the former an emotional delivery that can be seen through every line of his honest and pure face. A favorite line of mine, which describes the difference between the two cops, comes from the Alonzo Harris character when he says to his young trainee, "This shit is chess, not checkers." This movie is not for your grandmother; it is not a romantic comedy that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy, but a movie that is totally submerging and a movie that will not let you go for days after you've see it.
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