On a purely visceral level, Training Day is easily the most exciting movie out there right now, but as a morality tale with anything large on its mind, it's a cop-out.
eFilmCritic.com
August 05, 2007
This isn't a serious movie, despite Denzel Washington in full eruption and giving his calloused lines more weight and authority than they deserve.
'Training Day' is still a very interesting thriller where Denzel Washington truly shines just as the lucid but equally necessary and inspired work of Ethan Hawke. [Full review in Spanish]
Director Fuqua keeps it slick and sleazy and stokes up the race some, but this only accelerates the movie's deafening rush toward the top and ever over.
Training Day isn't just one of the finest cops-and-robbers thrillers of recent years, full of devious twists and gut-grinding tension, but it also steers clear of convenient moral formulas.
My guess is that the conceit was meant to be that Denzel's a bad guy, and that's fun to watch. Instead, this just adds another to his list of bad film's he's acted in...
If he makes it through the trial by fire -- and a blandly twisting plot with no meaningful revelations or substantial themes -- Hawke will get a promotion, but there's nothing in it for us.
