Sound the sirens: A smart, involving movie aimed at grownups has finally arrived in theaters. Training Day is a provocative police drama that confronts the fact that when it comes to ethics, the world of law enforcement can contain more shades of gray than black and white. What bumps the film up to the Don't Miss category, though, is a sensational lead performance by Washington as a charismatic narcotics cop who is completely corrupt.
Washington portrays Det. Sgt. Alonzo Harris, a 13-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. With his intimate knowledge of the streets and willingness to do whatever it takes to keep them clean, Harris is a tremendously productive lawman, but his moral compass is woefully bent. The extent of his crookedness slowly becomes apparent to Jake Hoyt (Hawke), an idealistic young beat cop, when he spends a long, eventful day in Harris's company.
"We're the police," Harris tells his rookie sidekick. "We can do what the f--- we want." The veteran officer proceeds to force Hoyt, at gunpoint, to smoke a pipeful of confiscated marijuana ("To be truly effective, a good narcotics agent should know and love narcotics," Harris explains). He also pays a friendly social call on a major drug dealer (Scott Glenn), chugs beer while driving, stops for a sexual tryst with a girlfriend (though he's married) and by late afternoon plots a murder to steal a big score of cash. All the while, Harris keeps up a steady stream of self-justifying patter, much of it borderline persuasive. After shooting a pusher in cold blood, he tells a stunned Hoyt, "He sold drugs to kids. The world is a better place without him."
What makes Washington so impressive here is the seductive cockiness he brings to the role. His Harris can rationalize even his worst behavior: He's nailing the bad guys, so what's the difference how he does it? In the less showy role of appalled apprentice, Hawke holds his own. Director Antoine Fuqua (The Replacement Killers) moves Training Day along at a fast clip without sacrificing character development, though the final scenes, featuring a chase and a high-caliber shootout, are extraneous and belong to a lesser, more predictable movie. (R)
Bottom Line: Seize the Day
Danny Aiello, Edoardo Ballerini
On a wintry evening in downtown Manhattan, Louis Cropa sits in his restaurant and surveys the hip crowd dining on the highfalutin Italian cuisine created by the chef, his son Udo (Ballerini). Louis's eye, however, is continually drawn to the most unfashionable couple in the room. Two dark-suited mobsters from Queens are in the balcony tonight, wolfing down plate after plate. These are the same men who killed Louis's friend and business partner—Louis has been known to dabble in bookmaking—and now they've come to demand a stake in the restaurant.
Dinner Rush is a comedy of escalating pandemonium set in the course of a single night. As the restaurant staff copes with everything from a power failure to the unexpected arrival of a famous food writer, director Bob Giraldi turns up the heat slowly. Moving things along with a controlled but fluid poise that would be the envy of any maitre d', he's setting us up for a terrific little twist at the end.
As Cropa, Aiello presides with gravitas and worldly humor. Mark Margolis is the other standout, a nasty gallery owner who trumpets his opinions in a voice of lead. (R)
Bottom Line: Compliments to the chef
John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale
The always likable Cusack deserves better than this cloying dust-mite of a romantic comedy. He plays Jonathan, a TV sports producer who—during a Christmas in Manhattan—meets Sara (Beckinsale, who's annoyingly smug here), the woman of his dreams, when both reach for the same pair of black cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale's. Each is already seeing someone else, and she announces that if they are truly meant for each other, fate will intervene. Fast-forward 10 years, when Jonathan's still in New York City, Sara is in San Francisco, and each is due to wed somebody else. Both begin to obsess over the other and wonder, "What if?" Fate, do your stuff.
There's about 20 minutes of actual story here. The rest of Serendipity consists of visual montages of the main characters going about their lives while pop songs wail on the soundtrack. Peter Chelsom, who last directed the hopeless Town & Country, also made this. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Destined to bore audiences
Donnie Yen, Yu Rong Guang
Yuen Wo Ping? The name may not ring a bell, but you know this Hong Kong filmmaker's magical work. He choreographed the high-flying (and widely imitated) martial-arts ballets in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In Iron Monkey, a Chinese-language action movie he directed in 1993, he gives us more of the same. This historical fantasy exists on a gravity-warping plane that lies somewhere between dream and Road Runner cartoon.
By day a village physician, Yang (Rong Guang) plays Robin Hood by night. He flies over tiled roofs and showers the poor with gold stolen from the imperial governor's plunder-rich coffers. The governor sets a visiting warrior named Wong Kei-Ying (Yen) on his trail. The fights whirl ever wilder, until by the end a third warrior has joined the battle. His booby-trapped sleeves unfurl with the playful snap of party favors. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: A kick
Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski
Featured attraction
In this scary thriller, two brothers who are driving through the West on their way to pick up a friend (Sobieski) start talking on a CB radio to amuse themselves. The older sibling, a pugnacious goofball named Fuller (Zahn), goads his younger brother Lewis (Walker) into faking a woman's voice and flirting over the CB with a lonely trucker who goes by the handle Rusty Nail. The siblings arrange a fake rendezvous with the trucker, giving him the number of the hotel room next to their own. When the male occupant of that room turns up mauled and mutilated, it becomes clear ol' Rusty lacks a sense of humor.
Director John Dahl gives Joy Ride the same potent mix of black humor and chills that he brought to The Last Seduction (1994), turning what could have been a routine horror movie into a superior suspense film. Zahn, as a cutup incapable of keeping his mouth shut even when his life depends on it, gives a jolt to every scene he's in. Sobieski and Walker are fine. (R)
Bottom Line: Follow that car
Ian Hart, Megan Burns
Set among Liverpool's working-class Irish at the height of the Great Depression, this brutal drama is almost suffocating in its relentless depiction of lives hemmed in by poverty. A laid-off dockworker (Hart) drifts into the ranks of the Black Shirts, the British fascists who saw nothing wrong with Hitler's particular worldview. Meanwhile his teenage daughter Teresa (Burns) is treated with unaccustomed sweetness when she goes to work as a maid to a wealthy Jewish matron.
This brief burst of sunlight soon clouds over too. In fact director Stephen Frears (High Fidelity) whips up such an unconvincingly violent storm for the finale, you can almost see him shaking a tin sheet. (R)
Bottom Line: A very bleak house
Don't Say a Word
To ransom his daughter from kidnappers, psychiatrist Michael Douglas must induce patient Brittany Murphy to divulge her secret trauma—the key to a long-ago heist. Psychobabble. (R)
Hardball Keanu Reeves bestirs himself to give a heartfelt performance as a loser who finds redemption coaching baseball for a team of poor kids. This is formula schmaltz. (PG-13)
The Others As haunted-house flicks go, this one starring Nicole Kidman as a mother on the verge of collapse is better than most. But do you really believe in ghosts? (PG-13)
Together A '70s Swedish commune squabbles over issues large (free love) and small (is Pippi Longstocking a capitalist tool?). Funny, wise and surprisingly warmhearted. (R)
Zoolander A slight but inventive comedy set in the hip and carefree world of fashion, this picture is cowritten and directed by and stars Ben Stiller. He plays a supermodel whose small bulb of a mind is brainwashed and programmed to kill by a cabal of designers. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
